Risk, Laura Poitras’ recently updated documentary about Julian Assange, is essentially a prequel to CitizenFour, Poitras’ planned film about Edward Snowden. It was Poitras’ unparalleled access to Assange between 2010 and 2013 that put her in contact with Snowden. When Assange holed himself up in the Ecuadorian embassy to avoid extradition, she lost contact with the Wikileaks founder. The director began to focus on Snowden – which seems to have angered Assange. The result is a gap of several years in the Risk narrative.
Captions try to fill in the viewer on later news stories relating to Wikileaks, including Chelsea Manning’s arrest, and the Arab Spring, but these elements feel rushed and unsatisfying. A newly added final act addresses Wikileaks’ role in the US Presidential election, and how the site may have facilitated Russia in tampering with the election via a document dump that prompted the – ultimately fruitless – investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email servers. Ambiguity around such complex issues is understandable, but the storytelling in Risk is lacking in focus.
Underlying this is an issue about Poitras’ personal involvement in all of this. Her portrait of Assange confirms what we’ve come to know over the past several years: Assange is depicted as arrogant, self-aggrandising, and callous regarding the allegations of sexual misconduct against him. As he opines that feminists are rape-crying radicals and jokes that sex scandals are good for his fame levels, he oozes smarminess.
All the while, however, Poitras’ personal history, and how it enabled the access she achieved, is underplayed. While some ambiguous voice-overs nod towards her initial admiration for Assange, her real motivation – whether in the first instance or in the shaping of the film – remain off-camera. Assange’s right-hand man, Jacob Applebaum, is also accused of sexual and personal misconduct, and a single line reveals that Poitras had a relationship with him. But this is never expanded upon, allowing all sorts of questions about both an initial possible complicity and later score-settling to hang over the film.. Thus, entirely valid questions about Julian Assange are ultimately overshadowed by the director’s conflict of interest and lack of transparency. Disappointing.