BuzzFlash Reviews
The Fall of Fujimori (DVD)
BUZZFLASH REVIEWS
This documentary is all the more riveting because the director extensively interviewed Fujimori, who lives in exile in Japan. He was apparently eager to tell "his side of the story."
This is a riveting piece of filmmaking that raises so many of the issues America is now grappling with, although Peru faced terrorism from residents of its own nation -- a distinction with a dramatic difference.
Fujimori uses the terrorist actions to accumulate "unitary executive" authority and became a corrupt dictator accountable to no one.
In "The Fall of Fujimori," we have a telling lesson in the price a nation pays when it abandons its democratic principles in the name of preserving the state, but the state ends up becoming synonymous with corrupt and immoral one-person rule. It's called a dictatorship.
Fujimori "was democratically elected in 1990, but used dictatorial powers throughout his reign while proclaiming that his actions were done in the name of democracy to defeat a brutal insurgency."
At least Fujimori has one thing over Bush. He was actually elected; Bush was selected and placed in power by the Supreme Court, not the voters of America.
Variety praises the film: "Without comment, Perry allows the viewer to draw his own parallels between the current U.S. war on terror and the one Fujimori waged. Those parallels, once recognized, give the film a scope far beyond that of a straight political biography. How Fujimori rationalizes or simply disregards the crimes of which he is accused -- corruption, kidnapping, murder -- makes the interview Perry conducted with him a classic in the psychology of power. Its echoes are unavoidable.
Perry has a strongly cinematic as well as political sensibility, Kim Roberts' editing makes the film as fluid as the Fujimori family life was full of potholes: Although his daughter Keiko, a prominent presence in the film, remained loyal to her father, Fujimori's wife Susana Higuchi actually ran for president against her husband while still living with him in the palace ("It was crazy!" Fujimori admits to an incredulous Perry).
"Hollywood actors pale next to my husband," Higuchi says, and it's a bracing moment for the viewer, who can't help but like Fujimori -- so gentlemanly, so seemingly logical. It's a great performance. And, if one believes his critics, a lifelong one."
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