Risk review: Wikileaks documentary offers unparalleled access to Julian Assange – The Sydney Morning Herald

Julian Assange in Risk: Sympathetic or not, he is a fascinatingly weird screen presence.Photo: Supplied

(M) 91 minutes

In 2011, Julian Assange and a handful of his supporters are gathered in Ellingham Hall, the Norfolk manor where he's taken refuge while battling extradition to Sweden over claims of sexual assault.

One of Wikileaks' encrypted files has been hacked, meaning that tens of thousands of "unredacted" diplomatic cables are about to be released online. As Assange rubs his eyes with the look of a man fighting chronic fatigue, one of his allies, Wikileaks editor Sarah Harrison, tries to get Hillary Clinton on the phone.

When Harrison is given the runaround from the State Department, Assange takes over the conversation, growing testy as he tries to convey the emergency to some guy named Chad on the other end of the line. "To make it clear, we don't have a problem. You have a problem."

This tense, character-driven scene could be inserted, beat for beat, into a dramatisation of the Wikileaks story. In a observational documentary like Laura Poitras' Risk, it's almost too effective to seem real as if the atmosphere of pulp suspense surrounding media coverage of Wikileaks had engulfed both filmmaker and subject, leaving no difference between fictionalised history and the real thing.

Poitras has played these kinds of tricks before famously in Citizenfour, her 2014 documentary about Edward Snowden, which mimicked the style of a conspiracy thriller. A major success in its own right, Citizenfour originated as a spinoff of Risk, which has been a work-in-progress since 2010.

Over the years, Poitras has been given unparalleled access to Assange and the Wikileaks team but other filmmakers have managed to beat her to the punch with this subject matter, notably Alex Gibney in his 2013 documentary We Steal Secrets.

Perhaps as a result, Risk is briefer and more impressionistic than might be expected from its long genesis, assuming a baseline level of familiarity with the Wikileaks saga. Titlecards with facts and figures seem meant to jog our memory rather than tell us anything fresh.

Poitras shows little interest in passing judgement on Wikileaks as an organisation, much less in exploring the substance of what they've revealed about for example, the American military or the CIA.

Rather, she aims to convey the texture of unfolding events from an insider's point of view. Her spacey voiceover suggests she imagines herself as a character in a science-fiction or spy story, even including accounts of her Assange-related dreams.

Reports indicate Assange was enraged by the film's original cut, and since its premiere at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival it has been re-edited by Poitras to reflect their falling out.

While there's no smoking gun here that will radically change anyone's viewpoint, judging by the current version, Assange's fury is understandable. Many scenes reveal him as both predictably high-handed and surprisingly naive, particularly in his private responses to the sexual misconduct claims.

Sympathetic or not, he remains a fascinatingly weird screen presence, with mannerisms as distinctive as those of any cult performer: the darting eyes and superior smirk, the hand gestures that turn every exchange into an impromptu lecture.

Poitras and her editors use these physical details for their own sly purposes, assembling the portrait of an Assange who's both a sophisticated player and a creature of appetite and instinct (one early shot shows him pulling the cap off a bottle with his teeth).

Some moments are bizarre enough to rival the new Twin Peaks: Assange taking a meeting in a leafy grove and reacting suspiciously to birds, or adopting a preposterous disguise to fool the British media. Then there's the scene where he's visited in the Ecuadorian embassy by celebrity fan-girl Lady Gaga, a 21st-century equivalent to Andy Warhol hanging out with one of his "superstars".

Too bad Poitras didn't take a hint from Lynch or Warhol regarding duration. If Risk were 10 or 20 hours long, it might not be any more "balanced" but it would have the potential of being a essential work, a close-up view of one of the great stories of our time.

As it stands, it provides a few extra pieces of a fascinating puzzle while testifying to the wholesale blurring of distinctions between journalism, art and entertainment, a process far advanced in Warhol's day and virtually complete in ours.

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Risk review: Wikileaks documentary offers unparalleled access to Julian Assange - The Sydney Morning Herald