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• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
• ASIN: B001F6GWSC
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #17,693 in Movies & TV (See Bestsellers in Movies & TV)

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3.0 out of 5 stars For true believers, and those who don't., July 1, 2009

By	Mark Kittell (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

"Strip Search" is too short to be called a movie; it is more like a 55-minute political tract. I had read somewhere that HBO aired it for a few days before pulling it. At first this seems surprising, given its pedigree; it is directed by Sidney Lumet, and stars Glenn Close and Maggie Gyllenhaal. One suspects that HBO didn't get wind of the film's content until it was too late; but given the stature of Lumet, it felt compelled to give it a token airing. It did, oddly enough, turn-up on this Portuguese DVD.

Was the film really that "bad"? Well, it depends on your definition of bad. The intentions certainly were not. It seems that Lumet, who has made a career of making socially and politically-charged movies, wanted to make a statement condemning national paranoia and "enhanced interrogation techniques," and that it is hypocritical that we condemn in other countries what we are doing in this country and abroad. Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo comes to mind, but it happens right here in this country. Jose Padilla--who had been jailed for years without charge until federal prosecutors were essentially forced to make one up--had been tortured into a piece of insensible flesh, and believed that even his own lawyers were just another part of the "interrogation" team. The jury that convicted him apparently saw only a sullen, unresponsive -and "obviously" guilty--individual.

The plot of this film is simple enough: two concurrent episodes that tell essentially the same story, one occurring in China, the other in the United States. A female American student (Gyllenhaal) is taken into custody by Chinese authorities for interrogation by a male operative, without an apparent charge. She is asked to identify a man accused of being a "terrorist," who she first denies knowing. There is a discussion concerning human rights, dissent, etc. Her counterpart is a male Arab student in the U.S., who is taken into custody and interrogated by a female operative (Close) for the same reason. The gimmick is that each detainee and interrogator says exactly the same thing word-for-word. Get it? What we do is no different from what they do.

This film is called "Strip Search" for a reason. It doesn't take long for the interrogators to resort to shaming the detainees by forcing them to strip down to their birthday suits. When this is not sufficient to make them cooperative, the detainees are subjected to a modified version of a full cavity search--male-on-female, female-on-male; nothing particularly graphic is shown, but you know what is going on. All this is done with the apparent complicity of each detainees' embassy: "I didn't know they were even here" winks the embassy functionary as he ducks out the backdoor.

On one hand, this is in-your-face political activism. On the other hand, it is sure to offend Chinese officials and the American right, and viewers who only see the gratuitousness and not the message. Only recommended for true believers--and those who refuse to believe that Bush-era abuses were less heinous than what "they" did.