I wish someone would hurry up and invent the CHI

Sex without love was also the norm for Georgiana Cavendish, 18th century socialite and chosen wife of the Duke of Devonshire, whose semi-interesting story is told in Saul Dibb’s semi-interesting The Duchess. At its opening shot of Keira Knightley’s back, ringlets bouncing and ornate train dragging along a perfectly manicured lawn, you can’t help but think you’ve seen this period piece before.

Nearly two hours later, you’ll feel like you’ve been sitting for three, and with that first instinct pretty much confirmed.

The most compelling aspect of The Duchess isn’t that the royal couple becomes a triple, nor that Georgiana (Knightley) was pressured by society and even her own mother (Charlotte Rampling) to—and this may come as a shock—put on a happy face and perform her wifely duties despite her loveless marriage.

More intriguing is Georgiana’s fashion-plate reputation and general popularity despite her husband’s preference for the company of other women or even his dogs; as one character puts it, “The Duke must be the only man in England not in love with his wife.” Georgiana was the people’s princess and pop icon two centuries before Lady Di came along—from the Duchess’ own bloodline, Diana Spencer being a distant niece.

Screenwriters Dibb, Jeffrey Hatcher, and Anders Thomas Jensen (working from Amanda Foreman’s biography of the duchess) also inject parallels to the current election into the story, as Georgiana uses her celebrity to promote the Whig party and its leaders bellowing about change.

The film, against all reason, actually perks up when politics are discussed, proving that its characters are thinking beings and not just models for flouncewear. (But wigs and hats, unfortunately, are given more prominence here than Whigs, with Knightley’s getting increasingly absurd, from merely hyper-inflated poofs to bizarre Afro-like wedges and, always, towering headgear.)

The source of Georgiana’s misery is Ralph Fiennes, whose Duke William is socially awkward and monosyllabic, sealing his marriage negotiations with the teenager’s mother with a wan, “So be it, then.” The Duke’s sole motivation for marrying was to produce a male heir, and despite Georgiana’s beauty, their sex life is mechanical, their romance nonexistent.

When G, as William calls her, fails to immediately produce a son, things go from civil to resentful. Among other humiliations, William saddles Georgiana with a daughter from a previous liaison so she can “practice her mothering skills,” and he later starts an affair with her best friend, Bess (Hayley Atwell), who had moved in with them—and never left.

Though The Duchess’ pace is slow, its acting is as good as can be expected, and better in Knightley’s case: Finally, she does more here than look aristocratic, with moments of Natalie Portman–esque impishness as well as nuanced expressions of heartbreak. Fiennes’ casting is atypical and he’s thorough as a bore. Yet, well, his character’s a bore.

After a while, William becomes truly hateful, and the trouble is that Georgiana, no matter how depressing her straits may be, becomes hard to sympathize with, too, seeming to get dumber as the years go on instead of learning how to play the game. Blame the hats and rent Atonement.

Heroes from the block

Spike Lee might have detailed everything that went wrong in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in his exhaustive four-hour miniseries, 2006’s When the Levees Broke, but you need watch only a few seconds of Trouble the Water to understand the most wrenching issue: One scene features a series of 911 calls, most achingly from a polite but clearly terrified woman saying she can’t get out of her flooding attic, as the screen shows a street corner that’s turned into an ocean.

“The police are not coming out until the weather conditions get better,” the operator says. Pause. “So I’m gonna die.” The remark goes unanswered.

A chunk of the footage in Tia Lessin and Carl Deal’s powerful and angering documentary is provided by aspiring rapper and Ninth Ward resident Kimberly Rivers Roberts, who sensed Katrina was going to be a “bad chick” but didn’t have money to leave. So she and her husband, Scott, filmed their experience from just before the storm hit, when the New Orleans sky was still blue.

Kimberly, 24, may not be Werner Herzog; her camerawork is Blair Witch shaky and her commentary is often gangsta crude. But there’s no denying her boast that compared to all the hurricane coverage by network news, “Nobody got what I got.” The footage is singular, not only of the storm’s force but of what it was like to be hunkered down in a dark attic with as many people as the space could hold.

Afterward, the directors take over but stick with the Roberts family as they wander their destroyed neighborhood, searching for the dead and wondering why, two weeks later, the National Guard still hasn’t arrived. (Answer: Many of Louisiana’s guardsmen were in Iraq, and President Bush “completely disagree[d]” with the idea of redeploying them for Katrina relief.)

The film touches on the relief efforts’ many missteps and doesn’t shy away from racial issues, opening with a sound bite of Chris Matthews asking if our leaders’ reaction would have been the same were the victims all white and, later, showing a black Tennessee woman saying, “If you don’t have money, if you don’t have status, you don’t have a government.”

What further elevates Trouble the Water above other Katrina-themed works is an astonishing hopefulness: The Roberts family, constantly helping others, maintains both a realistic and positive perspective on their situation, with Kimberly in particular showing remarkable resilience. At one point, she performs a rap about her life that’s inspiring—and not half-bad. As she says, “I can’t do nothing [now] but go up.”

This is a modern, platter-style projection system. And for you morons yelling at the booth, it cannot be rewound, fast-forwarded, or otherwise operated like your Daewoo VCR.

Lionsgate: No one wants to pirate Religulous. So the next time you — and all of your other studio friends — have some art-house documentary to screen for critics and a selection of I’ma-gonna-see-a-picture-fer-free! public, please send the print in plenty of time for the theater to properly build it. Before the starting time, for instance, would be good, but even earlier — dare I ask for a day? — would be even better.

Actually, forget the documentary restriction: Any film that you would like presented in an acceptable manner — which, whether new movie or restored print, should mean a pristine image and crisp sound — should arrive at its home in time to be carefully assembled.

Maybe you don’t know this, but theater companies have long since done away with union projectionists. Now, the 16-year-old who tears your ticket runs up to the booth around the posted starting time to rev up the projector, then runs back to the floor to mop up a spill in front of concessions. There’s no one manning the booth in a multiplex to ensure the prints in every house are a-OK — in focus, in frame, at the proper volume, even set up with the right lens. (Scope versus flat. Makes a bit of a difference.)

In my professional life, I’ve shown up at too many screenings only to be told that the print hadn’t arrived, or could I come back in an hour or two because it’s still being built? In my personal time, I’ve sat through a whole lot of dismal presentations, both from lack of proper care that real projectionists once lavished on film reels and from a general obliviousness to issues that suddenly crop up after the machine gets going. That’s because no one’s upstairs to pay attention.

What prompted this rant? Years of quiet disgust that boiled over at tonight’s Religulous screening at the Landmark Bethesda. The movie started 20 minutes late — in this case, the messenger was literally blamed, but I’m sure the courier didn’t decide to ship out the print the day of the screening — and about an hour into what had turned out to be a thoughtful and entertaining doc, things went all upside-down and backward. (Funny, though the interview subjects seemed, as one viewer amusingly pointed out, to be “speaking in tongues,” a Bob Dylan track was still identifiable.)

The free-pass peeps yelled out at no one in particular; one dude even went up to the booth glass and started pounding on it. (The rent-a-cops, who before the movie started were already shining their flashlights in people’s faces to get them to turn off cellphones, loved this. What a fucking circus.) We critics grumbled about the state of affairs and patiently waited while, we were told, the person who was trying to fix the problem was on the phone with the general manager (ha!) to get instruction. About 15 minutes later, the movie did indeed start again — and then promptly ended.

The solution to the backward reel? Cut it out, skip to the next — and, obviously, final — one, and hope that no one notices.

We noticed. And we’re sick of it. I know a lot of what ends up on the big screen turns out to be garbage, but how about at least going back to treating the physical reels and the art that went into producing them with some respect? Otherwise, it’s just adding another layer of trash to an industry that doesn’t deserve any more.

C’est magnifique

Love at first sight—or, more often in the case of American films, sex at first sight—can be an eye-rolling development if you’re not an über-romantic seeking escape at the cinema. But even realists might forgive the frequent declarations of devotion between characters whose relationships seem shorter than the feature itself in A Girl Cut in Two, which is, astonishingly, the 68th film from French New Waver Claude Chabrol.

That charm comes partially from the mesmerizing lovers themselves, in this case a triangle played by Ludivine Sagnier, Benoît Magimel, and François Berléand. But it’s Chabrol who truly captivates: His fluid camera and less-is-more storytelling is thrillingly Hitchcockian, and his lack of judgment regarding the sexuality of his characters is refreshingly French.

Sagnier, best known as the vixen in 2003’s Swimming Pool, plays Gabrielle Deneige (subtitles change her surname to “Snow”), a Lyons weathergirl whose golden loveliness helps put her TV career on a fast track. It also enchants two suitors: Charles (Berléand), a reclusive, renowned, and married author 30 years her senior, and Paul (Magimel), the wealthy, entitled brat born to a late pharmaceutical tycoon who’s more age-appropriate but insufferable and possibly unstable.

Gabrielle allows both to court her, often more interested in jumping at either men’s summons than attending to work duties. She still lives with her mother (Gabrielle’s age isn’t specified, but the 29-year-old Sagnier looks all of 17 at times), but that’s OK—Mum (Marie Bunel) is concerned about her daughter’s naiveté but open-minded, generally discussing her affairs as if they were a Sex and the City subplot.

A Girl Cut in Two is a bit schizophrenic in tone as it turns into a murder thriller in its last chapter, harking back to an opening sequence bathed in red. But in between, it’s all high living, rivalry, and romance as Gabrielle professes her love for Charles, who toys with her, which prompts Gabrielle to toy with Paul, who also announces his love after one date and threatens to not give up until she’s his.

At times, Chabrol’s script, co-written by stepdaughter and first-time feature writer Cécile Maistre, is quite thin: Paul frequently talks about how much he detests Charles, for example, even before Gabrielle is a factor, but we never learn why. And marking the passage of time seems as unimportant to the filmmakers as wedding vows are to Charles. It’s stunning to hear a character mention late in the film that a year has passed; Gabrielle’s field-playing seems at that point to have been going on for a few weeks, tops.

In this case, however, style trumps substance. Aside from all the love coos, the dialogue is witty and smart, with Gabrielle at least allowed to show off a quick mind if not always impressive emotional maturity. (When an older coworker tells her, “You tease!” she responds, “You father of three!”) The director and Magimel, a frequent Chabrol collaborator, have fun with Paul, portraying him as a dandy who drives his absurdly expensive sports car squealy and serpentine, usually accompanied by playful music.

And it’s hard not to fall in love with Sagnier, too, whose luminosity and treading of the innocent/sexy line plays like a blend of American counterparts Blake Lively and Scarlett Johansson.

Most intoxicating, though, is Chabrol’s direction, which is often achingly graceful. Particularly gorgeous are his scene shifts: As lascivious and even perverse as these characters are, it’s all talk and only a hint of action, with Chabrol’s camera gliding away just when a less tasteful director might zoom in. Gabrielle’s first request that Charles kiss her floats off to a shot of the nearby Handbook of Behavior for Little Girls; later, when Charles subtly suggests that Gabrielle perform oral sex while he’s writing, the shot is of rapidly typing fingers that suddenly extend before the fade.

A Girl Cut in Two feels retro without being prudish, decadent without being tacky. And despite a few flaws in the storytelling, it’s more transporting than any Hollywood romance that may share the marquee at the multiplex.

And that’s where THIS person is going to torment you

The sexual attention that the 13-year-old half-Lebanese, half-American character gets in Towelhead doesn’t divide her in two; it’s enough to rip the poor girl, and the film, to shreds. With its sensationalist title (from Alicia Erian’s novel of the same name), you’d imagine that the central trauma young Jasira faces living in Gulf War-era America is prejudice, particularly living in not-terribly-diverse areas like Syracuse, N.Y., and suburban Texas. But from the opening scene in Alan Ball’s feature directorial debut, it’s clear the teenager has bigger issues to deal with than being stereotyped.

Jasira (Summer Bishil, who was 18 during filming) is introduced with shaving cream on her pubic area, which is about to be shaved by mom’s seedy live-in boyfriend, Barry (Chris Messina). When her mother, Gail (Maria Bello), comes home and finds the evidence, naturally she freaks out—and then ships Jasira from central New York to live with her father in Texas, noting to her sobbing daughter at the airport that “this whole thing is your fault.”

Jasira, she says, needs to learn that “there are right ways and wrong ways to act around men,” the wrong way apparently being a girl whose body is changing yet still likes to wear shorts and cute tops. Gail believes that living with a man, even if it’s her boorish, ignorant, jackass of a father, Rifat (Peter Macdissi), will help teach her. Sure enough, the first morning Jasira comes to the breakfast table in her summer-appropriate PJs, Dad slaps her good.

It’s not the only abuse Jasira will face, be it physical, emotional, or sexual, and she seems to get it from all the adults around her, all the time. Rifat’s new neighbors include an Army reservist (Aaron Eckhart), who molests Jasira—and takes her out on a date!—after catching her looking at his girlie magazines, which she masturbates to, and his young son, Zack (Chase Ellison), who calls her “towelhead” and a host of other slurs whenever she’s baby-sitting him.

Jasira’s schoolmates, seen primarily in a French class in which the teacher’s accent is straight Texan, also mock and insult her. A black boy, Thomas (Eugene Jones), invites her over for dinner after he catches her masturbating during recess—she does this a lot, and Ball doesn’t shy away from it—and gropes her as soon as his parents are out of sight.

Her father isn’t thrilled that Jasira got her period, forbids him from seeing Thomas once he discovers he’s black, calls his ex-wife all sorts of names, and fools around with his new, scantily dressed girlfriend right in front of his daughter. When Mom visits, she’s still a cruel nutcase.

Unbelievably, there’s more. And the worst part? Ball, writer of 1999’s Oscar-winning American Beauty, attempts to mix humor into the horror. Apparently, characters like Rifat are supposed to be so racist, controlling, and narrow-minded, it’s funny.

Needless to say, it doesn’t work. One flaw is that Bishil, while pretty, never comes across as the Lolita-like temptress she’s allegedly supposed to be, so all the blame that adults put on her—fundamentally misguided even if the girl were a mini Angelina Jolie—feels forced.

The piling on, though, is Towelhead’s undoing: Nearly every scene Jasira is in is sexually charged, and except for another neighborhood couple (Toni Collette and Matt Letscher), not one character in the film is anything but hateful. Collette’s sensible Melina, who starts to see what Jasira is going through and tries to protect her, is a bit of a reprieve from the battering—both for the girl and the audience. But ultimately Towelhead is as intolerable as its name.

Viewers might want to try this on eyes, ears

The riots begin early in Battle in Seattle, and not 20 minutes into Stuart Townsend’s portrayal of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, there’s a doomsday exchange between the city’s police chief and its freaked-out mayor: “There’s only one option left!” the cop tells Jim Tobin (Ray Liotta), who recognized the activists’ right to assemble and had forbidden the use of violence against them. So it’s time to get dirty, but after demonstrations, chaos, and greenlit use of force, where could the narrative possibly go for another 80 minutes?

Back to more of the same, essentially. For anyone who wasn’t paying attention nine years ago, Seattle had been scheduled to host the first WTO conference on American soil. Peaceful and apparently ridiculously well-organized protesters set out to shut it down, and they did—but only after five days of allegedly unprovoked police brutality and hundreds of arrests that turned the downtown area into “Beirut,” as the governor (Tzi Ma) puts it.

Townsend, an actor better known for being Charlize Theron’s boyfriend than for his roles in films such as The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, has created an unremarkable and often dull writing and directorial debut. His docudrama approach, which weaves real footage into his fictional story, was a good idea, and the war-zone bedlam of clashing masses comes across.

The lead anarchists, however, are less than gripping. Martin Henderson, a nonpresence in films such as The Ring and Torque, is equally uncharismatic here as Jay, an activist whose vengeance is personal. Lou (Michelle Rodriquez, playing, surprise, a tough girl) joins Jay’s group and serves as a forced love interest. And André Benjamin is Django, a save-the-turtles guy who’s meant to add levity but is mostly annoying, particularly when he tries to rouse a bus of arrestees by singing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.” On the other side of the conflict are—irony alert!—known activist Woody Harrelson and Theron, playing a riot cop and his pregnant wife, as well as Connie Nielsen, the token hottie reporter with a heart.

The cast spans the spectrum of acting talent, but even the best can’t make Townsend’s awkward dialogue sound good (especially Liotta, whose increasing panic is hilarious). Worse, there’s no mistaking whose side Townsend is on: The film begins and ends with WTO history lessons, with plenty of sermonizing about humanity versus money in between. The camerawork, too, underscores scenes of injustice, in one case cutting to worked-over protesters after the line, “Look around you!” just in case the audience fell asleep. Whoops, almost did.

First she pledges love for Hitler, now this.

The jaunty, speedy, “Flight of the Bumblebee”-esque piece of orchestral music that introduces Jirí Menzel’s I Served the King of England is nearly too playful to bear. It’s also an apt prelude.

The Czech writer-director’s adaptation of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel is, on its surface, a story about a diminutive entrepreneur who bootstrapped his way from selling hot dogs to owning a hotel in ’30s Prague. But Hrabal, whose works have often been adapted for the screen, was a satirist, and Menzel crams the life of Jan Díte with enough absurdist whimsy to make Busby Berkeley’s head explode.

Some of it’s charming; some of it’s tedious—and by the time the film’s main themes veer from money and girls to war and eugenics, you’ll be quite ready for this two-hour Life Is Beautiful echo to end.

I Served the King of England is told in flashbacks from the perspective of an elder Díte (Oldrich Kaiser), who has just been released from prison. We don’t know what his crime was, but we do learn that Dite—the name means “child”—was lucky enough to be locked up for only 14 years and nine months of his 15-year sentence. Then, as he takes a deep breath and marvels at his freedom, Díte gets his bag stuck in the prison gate. Menzel may as well have added a sad-trombone cue, but it’s early, so the gentle gags are still amusing.

The ex-con is consigned to a dilapidated cottage in a deserted, wooded German village that’s home to a few other fringe members of society, including a group searching for “musical” trees. More important, though, Díte becomes acquainted with Marcela (Zuzana Fialová), a virtual forest sprite who seems to exist only to giggle, give sultry stares, and let Díte ogle her, all of which sparks memories of the now-creepy Czech’s enchanted youth.

Díte the Younger (Ivan Barnev) is, at least, much more likable and interesting than his grizzled future self, so it makes sense that the film is likewise most enjoyable when it details Díte’s past. His early days as a slippery hot dog vendor at a railroad station—he’d fumble with a customer’s change until the train was pulling away and he couldn’t give the money back—are framed as a black-and-white silent movie; there’s constant slapstick as Díte serves at increasingly formal locations, including a high-end brothel and a chic Prague hotel. At every job, he learns just enough before circumstances—sometimes a big tip, but mostly spots of trouble he gets into—dictate his resignation.

Díte serves fat cats with ravenous appetites for food, money, and sex, and their behavior is often abominable (particularly toward women, who are frequently naked and consistently there only to pleasure the guys). But Díte admires them: “Like all rich people,” he muses in voice-over, “they were as playful and merry as puppies.”

Though the fastidiously planned chaos around Díte often strains the viewer’s patience (such as the forced brothel scene in which servers and prostitutes are examined in a lineup, then throw food and frolic in a pool after the “industrialists” arrive), the “perfectly piccolo” waiter himself is a more reliable source of laughs. Barnev, with poofy blond hair and saucer eyes, gives a deftly Chaplinesque performance, speaking infrequently and twirling around his customers with perfectly timed grace, even after repeated smacks to the back of the head by his superiors.

Always keeping his mind on his goal of becoming a millionaire, Díte approaches each position as a social study, even making a game of his observation that no matter how wealthy people are, they’ll usually scramble on their knees should a few coins be dropped near them.

The running coin-tossing joke is amusing but ultimately superficial—as is the film overall. Greed is an obvious theme, both in the excesses that Díte witnesses as well as in his own ambitions. And though his dubious meal ticket after the rise of Nazism leads him to his first love, a Hitler-worshiping teacher named Liza (Julia Jentsch), Díte’s attraction to her is both unbelievable and an awkwardly handled tonal shift.

The elder Díte reminisces to try to make sense of his life, at one point literally sitting in front of several mirrors to watch his reflection. The shot is artful—Menzel’s visual style, often employing lovely, lyrical surrealism, is the film’s most consistent strength—but empty. Díte never really finds any meaning or lessons in the choices he made, and neither will the audience.

The Grocer’s Jerkface

Whereas I Served the King of England is all about the high life, The Grocer’s Son argues for a return to basics. French director Eric Guirado’s film focuses on Antoine (Nicolas Cazalé), a 30-year-old who’s guilted into helping his family’s small Provence grocery after his father has a heart attack. Antoine quit the business 10 years earlier to move to the city and doesn’t want to return, particularly because his relationships with his Dad (Daniel Duval) and responsible brother, Françoise (Stéphan Guérin-Tillié) are strained.

It’s not necessarily the sight of his panicked mother (Jeanne Goupil) perched on his apartment’s beanbag chair that changes his mind, though: Antoine has his eye on a neighbor, Claire (Clotilde Hesme), who does little but work toward getting accepted into college and worries about how to pay for it. So Antoine borrows money from Mom with the intention of working it off—and having an excuse to invite an unsuspecting Claire to the quiet countryside.

Antoine’s sneaky bribe is the first sign of his jackassery, and there are plenty more to come. At the beginning of Guirado’s story (co-written with Florence Vignon), Antoine seems a bit petulant but will still be sympathetic to anyone who’s been suffocated by a small town and overbearing family. Once he and Claire arrive in Provence, though, Antoine proves to be nothing but a brat.

The gorgeous scenery and “country air”—which a new customer too-obviously says in passing should do “nothing but good” to his stressed-out wife—doesn’t affect Antoine a whit as he drives his father’s mobile-grocery van and is rude and demanding to his charming elderly patrons. He honks obnoxiously once he gets to their hamlets and hauls off before a tiny old woman with a cane can hobble over. Credit is no longer an option, and jokes are a waste of time.

Antoine’s romantic moves are no smoother: He doesn’t respect Claire’s need for quiet study time and certainly doesn’t understand her politeness with his family or the customers. And when she does give in to his advances (that country air and, perhaps, a bit of alcohol is to blame) but is cool the next day, his abhorrent reaction registers at about the sixth-grade level.

Redemption is impending, of course. But whatever it is that flips Antoine’s switch isn’t obvious, and he’s too much of a boor until that point anyway. Ignore the main character, however, and The Grocer’s Son is nearly salvageable as a celebration of rustic pleasures, from the sun in Antoine and Claire’s faces as they ride in the van to the audible crunch whenever someone bites into a thick slice of bread blanketed in fresh cheese.

The crinkled old customers, too, are authentic, locals with no professional experience except being delightfully eccentric shoppers. (Especially entertaining is the cantankerous, boozy Lucienne [Liliane Rovère], who’s openly hostile to Antoine.)

Guirado attempts to draw a clear connection between the unpleasant Antoine and his father, a domineering and hypercritical brute himself. Meanwhile, the good kid is masking his own depression, not telling his family that his wife left him years ago. Françoise’ story, though minor, is the more interesting and sympathetic one—if only Guirado had chosen to focus on the grocer’s other son.

Two of the lucky — and identifiable — ones

In the documentary A Jihad for Love, a South African Muslim named Muhsin Hendricks is shown being profiled on a radio show, coming clean to listeners about his unorthodox views and radical lifestyle. Listeners respond by phoning in vitriol: “We should definitely bring back the death sentence for this guy,” says one. “It’s unacceptable. He’s bringing down the name of Islam.”

You might imagine Hendricks is a terrorist, or at least a sympathizer. Nope: He’s gay.

Before he came out, Hendricks was a Cape Town imam raised in a strict Islamic home. When he was a teenager, he knew that the Koran seemed to forbid homosexuality; the book’s teachings about Sodom and Gomorrah called for such people to be stoned to death.

So Hendricks prayed for his temptations to be taken away. He married and had kids. But when a separation from a close male friend left him grieving, Hendricks revealed his true feelings to his wife and set out to change the thinking that one cannot be both gay and a devout Muslim.

Writer-director Parvez Sharma’s debut feature documentary is a needed introduction to an issue that’s quietly disrupted the Muslim community while more internationally relevant problems of suicide bombers and profiling have been bullhorned.

Besides Hendricks, several gay and lesbians are profiled, capturing Muslims from Cairo to Paris to Turkey. Most have reached the point where they’re self-accepting; others, such as a Moroccan Arab woman named Maryam, still believe that their sexuality is a sin. Nearly all talk of begging Allah to make them “normal.” Maha, Maryam’s girlfriend, recalls praying to either “get rid of this or die.”

Though some of Sharma’s subjects live in countries that do not punish homosexual acts, many still refuse to be fully identified onscreen for fear of retribution from their families or exile from their mosque. That caution is understandable, but it doesn’t exactly make for compelling viewing: Sharma mainly blurs faces, though he’ll also film people from behind or let us see one eye.

Mazen, an Egyptian man who was arrested at a gay club and imprisoned in 2001, tells the bulk of his story while we look at the back of his head. Three years later he’s in Paris, watching footage of the man responsible for the raid. “Today I’m ready to reveal my face,” Mazen says and slowly turns for Sharma to capture his profile. It should be a dramatic moment, but it just feels unnecessarily staged.

The documentary’s bigger failing is its repetitiveness. The Koran addresses homosexuality only in a passage about Sodom and Gomorrah, and that’s the teaching every person portrayed here—and there are approximately a dozen of them—is butting his or her head against. Hendricks brings the most insight to the subject, and it’s heartening when another scholar agrees to meet with him to discuss the issue.

But while Hendricks lays out a solid argument that the punishment called for in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah was in response to rape and brutality, not same-sex attraction, the scholar has a quick answer: “You are just playing with words,” he says. “No person can make an interpretation to suit his desires, or her desires, when you have clear-cut verses.”

With each familiar story, you wish Sharma dug a little deeper into the issue. Still, his message conveys. You ache for the outcasts and semi-closeted and cheer for couples such as Ferda and Kiymet, who openly show affection even while in front of a mosque. Especially touching is one man’s trip to Canada, where he seeks asylum. “Today is my new birthday,” he says upon his arrival.

Ultimately, too, this documentary’s message is one that is all too universal, relating to many people whose religion pronounces their lifestyle a sin. Hendricks may parse the Koran’s specifics, but a lesbian named Sana argues the case for acceptance best: “My loving a woman caused no harm.”

The face of a terrorist? Well, like they say, it’s complicated.