Mark Reviews Movies: COUP 53

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 18, 2020

Director Taghi Amirani has been working on Coup 53 for at least a decade. By the end of this documentary, one can imagine the filmmaker working in a similar capacity for another 10 years.

The story of the 1953 coup in Iran, orchestrated by the United States (officially) and the United Kingdom (unofficially), becomes clear through archival interviews, stylized dramatizations, and boxes of documents. Even so, some mysteries remain unknown and, more importantly, many official admissions of culpability remain unstated.

The film begins with Amirani displaying his dedication to the study of "Operation Ajax," as the organized coup was called in CIA documents. His research began back in 2009, and even before we have much context for the story the filmmaker wants to tell, we're caught up in a whirlwind of Amirani interviewing people, going through piles of documents, and explaining his own background. He grew up in Iran but received university education in England. His life would have been much different if not for the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and that, as he and many others conclude, wouldn't have happened, if not for the coup 26 years prior.

To explain the specific details would take too much time (Once the film gets into them, it is a ceaseless torrent of information), but it's about oil, of course. The coup was against the government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who was democratically elected and nationalized the country's oil industry.

Amirani's filmmaking process is akin to watching a detective at work. He interviews family members of Mosaddegh, which leads him to interviews of British officials conducted for a 1985 documentary miniseries. In those transcripts, a former MI-6 agent admits to organizing the coup. The footage never made it to broadcast, and all evidence of it, including the man's name, has disappeared from the official record (Ralph Fiennes is brought in to perform the interview as it might have happened).

Intercutting outtakes from the television series and archival, as well as dramatized, footage, Amirani provides about as full and straightforward an account of the coup, from the build-up to its aftermath, as possible. It's an ambitious—and sometimes too overwhelming—act of bringing research to life. Amirani's passion is obvious, but admirably, the filmmaker doesn't use Coup 53 as a platform for his own views. He allows the sad, terrible history to speak for itself.

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