Pakistan boasts the sixth-largest population on the planet, has nuclear arms and is ruled by a volatile mixture of military and religious influences. And of course it just happens to be located smack in the middle of a global tinderbox.
Thus it would make sense for us to know more about this country, where a cabinet minister was assassinated just this week. The documentary “Bhutto,” although it focuses on the charismatic figure of Benazir Bhutto, is really a tutorial on the history of this rather significant place.
The film provides a brisk account of the creation of Pakistan, carved out of India in the late 1940s as a way of dividing territory into Muslim and Hindu states. A profile follows of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who led Pakistan in the 1970s and was executed by the state in 1979.
His eldest child was a daughter he designated as the keeper of his political legacy, an unusual move for an Islamic country (the film describes the Bhutto family as the “Kennedys of Pakistan”). But his judgment proved correct: Benazir Bhutto espoused the virtues of democracy while bringing eloquence and glamour to the political stage.
She was educated at Harvard and Oxford, but returned to be a force in Pakistan after her father’s death. The film reminds us at the beginning that Benazir Bhutto herself would someday fall to an assassin’s bullet, so the trajectory of her career has both political intrigue and a terrible kind of suspense.
Directors Duane Baughman and Johnny O’Hara delve into the accusations of corruption leveled at her own terms as prime minister, leaving the impression that these charges had more to do with political maneuvers by her opponents than anything else. Independent sources will have to verify that.
A gallery of talking heads inhabit the documentary, none more compelling than Bhutto’s husband and two daughters. Benazir Bhutto seemed all too aware of the dangers of returning to Pakistan after years of exile (“There may be somebody there with a bullet,” we hear her say of her public appearances), and yet she strode almost defiantly into public view at that time, even after a failed suicide bombing against her.
None of the film’s commentators can explain away contradictions in Bhutto’s personality, some of which surely had to do with her grasp of political power-playing. But her efforts at creating something other than an eye-for-an-eye climate in Pakistan come across as sincere, as conveyed in the many clips of her talking.
“Democracy is the greatest revenge,” she said in a speech before the U.S. congress, stating a political philosophy that could change the destinies of countless nations, including the Arab states currently overthrowing their regimes. Whether or not her words will be heeded is a question that hangs over the near future of geopolitics, and a good reason to see the movie.
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