The Brooklyn Rail

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

Widely (though mistakenly) attributed to the American author Ambrose Bierce, the epigraph with which Hailey Benton Gates’s Atropia opens seems to announce cinematic action in some far-flung locale. Its education remains much closer to home, however. The film’s geography proves at once banally familiar and shrouded in secrecy—a paradox central to an impish satire which garnered the Grand Jury prize at last year’s Sundance.

The name “Atropia” refers, in fact, to a fictional country invented by the United States military for training purposes in 2012. Imagined as belonging both to the Near East and the Global South (the preferred sites of American military intervention, after all), its expressly abstract name belies actual locations. A dozen or so ersatz towns in America’s western deserts have been outfitted over the last decade with replica markets and populated with make-believe “natives.” They are used for role-playing imagined military occupations and all manner of related mayhem. Stocked with a rotating cast of mock-Middle Eastern actors, the simulated villages stage “live-play scenarios” for soldiers on the ground: chief among them, locals recusant in language, cooperation, and attitude.

It is in one such faux village, named Medina Wasl, that Atropia is set. The year is 2006, and the US-led invasion of Iraq begun three years earlier has aggravated Sunni-Shia tensions to the point of all-out, sectarian civil war. The need for American troops—and hence for their stateside training—has only increased. The film thus takes place right before the so-called “surge” of 2007, which would see deployments peak with nearly two hundred thousand soldiers. Mock-up donkeys, fake blood, pretend explosions, and simulated hostility help prepare them for the real thing.

Written and directed by Hailey Benton Gates in her feature-length debut, the film follows an aspiring American actor of Iraqi descent named Fayruz (Alia Shawkat), playing one of several Arab women in a village ostensibly taken by American infantry. Her frustrated professional aspirations become further complicated by a fraught romance with a fellow actor. A lanky white American bearing the nom de guerre Abu Dice (Callum Turner) is a regular role-player as an Iraqi “terrorist mastermind.” More mundanely, he is Fayruz’s evasive love interest—one she pursues through various personal and professional ruses by turns droll and bathetic.

Whether playing a mustard-gas brewing fanatic or an innocuous celebrant at some local wedding, Medina Wasl’s actors interpret scenes issued daily from an on-site command center, helmed by officers Hayden (Tim Heidecker) and Pina (Chloë Sevigny). These leaders liaise in turn with military officers who direct squads of soldiers as they cajole, corral, or ingratiate themselves with local “Atropians.” One actor even plays a fake American journalist, whose presence is meant to teach the soldiers how to deflect in the face of investigative reporting (including inquiries, it is presumed, into transgressions or atrocities). Some of the actors barter with each other for different roles. Several complain about their assignments. “The amputees get paid three times as much as me!” one whines. The casting of actual amputees among the town’s (and the film’s) actors underscores the dark humor afoot, as well as an attendant, mordant sense of actuality. The role-playing expertise of Abu Dice, it will turn out, draws upon more than dramatic nous, while actual Iraqis (and other Arabs) form part of the acting cadre.

One of the film’s most intelligent conceits lies in the affinities it traces between the actors and the enlisted soldiers with whom they interact. All are for hire, after all, and many are equally desperate for work, despite the relative travails entailed. One actor has a Ph.D. Some soldiers, conversely, ply their trade to obtain educational advancement (which might one day leave them as underemployed as that doctorate-bearing actor). Many of the actors are looking for a big break in a small gig. The appearance one afternoon of a Hollywood director (Channing Tatum)—playing along with the action as research for his planned cinematic recreation of the fateful Falluja offensive—offers them a chance. One female actor, however, becomes actually wounded during the scene. The temporary suspension of the “live play” calls attention to the higher mathematics of acting entailed in the film—dissimulations within a simulation, redolent of the relationships between military service and performing. “You’re a good actor,” a soldier quips to one of the dramatis personae. “You should enlist.”

The boundaries between reality and simulation shift constantly, whether between soldiers fraternizing with actors in between scenes, or the intermittent lapse of play-acting. (The serving of pork at one gathering after hours turns briefly into a flashpoint.) The main faultline of shifting ground is Fayruz’s rocky romance with Abu Dice. If their affair entails some poignant moments, it proves less compelling than the wider film’s wider upshot. Indeed, the film’s strength lies in the parallel development of other, less central relationships, which offer up material for physical comedy, gallows humor, and wry reflections on American adventurism. The village “chieftain”—an actual Iraqi hired to play an imaginary Iraqi—tells Fayruz that their work entails “helping global teenagers to invade us in a gentler way.”

For all its wit, the film does not shy from the Iraq War’s consequences, particularly its mental and emotional toll. The inclusion of real documentary footage of its violence—and the Bush presidency’s justificatory fabrications—at one point breaks the spell of an otherwise whimsical narrative. In jerking the narrative back to actuality—amidst the various kinds of performance and “play” propping it up—the documentary material is bracing and enlightening. A running joke in the film about the protection of local fauna hammers home the contrasting treatment—in more remote terrain—of certain human beings. “These enemies,” George W. Bush intones onscreen in a historical clip, “have embraced a cult of death.”