MoviesReview

Ziad Jarrah, the hijacker-pilot on the United 93 flight, is reinvented as a considerate husband in Anne Zohra Berrached’s film

Anne Zohra Berrached’s film is ambitious and interestingly intended, but naive and flawed, with a fundamental problem, which is right up there in the title. It presents us with a romantically imagined fictional couple inspired by Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese-born 9/11 hijacker-pilot on the United 93 flight and his one-time German-Turkish partner Aysel Şengün, whom he had met while a student drawn into al-Qaida’s notorious Hamburg Cell. Jarrah is often regarded as different from the other hijackers in that he came from a wealthy family, was not averse to the western world of pleasure, and was even rumoured to have had (temporary) qualms about the mission itself. Jarrah was dramatised as a rich-kid jihadi convert in Antonia Bird’s TV drama The Hamburg Cell in 2004, and made an appearance in Paul Greengrass’s real-time thriller United 93, two years later.

Jarrah is fictionalised here as Saeed (Roger Azar), a smart, idealistic Lebanese student and would-be pilot in Germany who falls for Turkish medical student Asli (Canan Kir); they marry but the relationship sours as he becomes more controlling, secretive and fanatical. His cousin’s plan to open a restaurant with a bank loan triggers an ugly, antisemitic tirade against “Zionists” and “moneylenders”. He heads off for an unexplained trip to Yemen but returns, apparently contrite, with scars and an apparent determination to have no more to do with these people – but then there is talk from the newly relaxed and smiley Saeed of going to flight school in Miami, Florida.

Copilot is well acted with some good scenes; including a fascinating account of Asli going to Beirut on her own to meet his family, hoping that Saeed will have gone to Beirut as well – only to find that he is not there and she is expected to tell her distraught in-laws where on earth her husband is. This romantic and considerate Saeed repeatedly calls Asli his “co-pilot”. When Asli goes out to Florida to visit he takes her up in a small aircraft and even lets her briefly take the controls. It is a lenient, evasive and obtuse vision: 9/11 jihadi fanatics did not think of women as “co-pilots”. They already had co-pilots – other terrorist men. Women were second-class citizens, irrelevant temptations and distractions compared with the macho martyrdom ahead. Copilot avoids this simple fact and does not really engage with Saeed’s purported second thoughts, or his apparent third thoughts re-committing to the hijack, or with the enigma of Asli’s failure to understand what is going on in his head. It’s a backstory fantasy which does not really come off.

Copilot is released on 10 September in cinemas.

This article was amended on 21 September to correct a suggestion that the real life characters on which the film is based were not married, and that Ziad Jarrah did not take Aysel Şengün on a small-plane flight in Miami.

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