Forbidden Lie$
Dir: Anna Broinowski
Rating: 3.5
Roxie Releasing
106 Minutes
When I first saw Forbidden Lie$, Anna Broinowski’s mind-twisting film about Norma Khouri, an author who fabricated not only a story about honor killing in Jordan but her entire existence, I began to question the faith we put into the “truth” of documentaries. Though many of us claim to be skeptical, if we see something in print or on the screen that screams “TRUE!”, we tend to blindly believe it. It is essential to recognize that even in a documentary, there are slants and biases. The director has as much power as in a narrative film. Footage can be altered, shown out of sequence, a soundtrack can really change the mood. In essence, a documentary can be a powerful and dangerous tool.
In 2003, Khouri’s book Forbidden Love, an account of the killing of one of the author’s Muslim friends at the hands of her own family, became an international sensation. The time was right for such a story. The Western world, still reeling from the psychological damage of 9/11 and the defiance of Saddam Hussein, demonized Arab nations and the salacious details of an innocent virgin murdered for a secret love added just the right spice to the pot. However, some details did not read right to many Jordanians (such as mistakes in basic geography and landmarks) and a pair of Australian journalists exposed Khouri to be not only a fraud, but an American con artist wanted by the FBI.
Broinowski wants us to experience Khouri’s duplicity firsthand in Forbidden Lie$. In a stroke of either brilliance or blind luck, the film is narrated by Khouri herself. It begins as a faithful reenactment of the events of the book and like the unsuspecting many that believed Khouri’s book, we are drawn into the lurid details of secret love and murder in Jordan. Why shouldn’t we believe it? We have been trained to look on documentaries as fact and movies as entertainment that may be “based” on a true story. But as Broinowski slowly picks apart Khouri’s deception, the author gets even more desperate to prove herself. In an age of Stephen Glass and James Frey, Khouri takes her deception a step further. She agrees to take Broinowski back to her “native” Jordan and prove the details in her story.
The most brilliant part of the film is that Broinowski allows the audience the experience what it is like to be duped by a pathological liar. As the film wears on, Khouri is so full of deception it is difficult to tell where the lies end and the truth begins. Even when Khouri claims she was molested by her father as a child, is impossible to believe anything the woman says. She has destroyed any and all credibility.
Forbidden Lie$ allows us to decide whether Khouri is sincere or a self-serving criminal. Broinowski shows us how easy it is to be caught up in the web of Khouri’s lies and by the film’s end the questions arises: how many other documentaries are nothing more than a pack of lies?
by David Harris
