Frankenstein in Baghdad

In his hotel room, Mahmoud wakes up feeling despondent after dreaming of holding the hand of a woman he loves. At noon, he calls for a prostitute to come to his room. When Zeina arrives in the evening, he tells her that her name is in fact Nawal al-Wazir. The woman laughs at this comment, but Mahmoud keeps on calling her Nawal. With intense passion, he embraces and kisses her before taking her to his bed. Then, while they are having sex, he tells her to “shut up” and brutally presses his hand against her mouth. Afterwards, the woman angrily goes to the balcony to smoke. When Mahmoud calls her, she replies, furious, that her name is Zeina, not Nawal.

Mahmoud reflects on other issues. He recalls going to Aziz’s coffee shop earlier to look for Hadi. There, Aziz told the journalist to leave the junk dealer alone, in an unusually solemn voice. He told Mahmoud that the Whatsitsname was none other than Hadi’s former friend Nahem Abdaki. After Nahem’s death, Hadi went to collect his friend’s body. However, all the victims’ body parts—caused by that day’s explosion—were mixed up. As a result, a worker told Hadi to gather any pieces he could find to reconstitute a body. This, Aziz explained, changed Hadi forever. Mahmoud objected to Aziz’s theory by evoking the Whatsitsname’s recording, but Aziz simply said that Hadi must have asked a friend to do so.

Although Mahmoud believed Aziz, he also thought that the stories on his recorder were too complex to have been invented by someone like Hadi. To solve these contradictions, Mahmoud considered knocking on Hadi’s door, but he realized that Hadi might in fact be more intelligent than he previously thought. Not wanting to become involved in another complicated story, Mahmoud decides to leave him alone.

A few days later, after Saidi has been gone for multiple days, a group of official-looking men enter the al-Haqiqa offices and ask Mahmoud about Saidi’s location, family, and economic activities. They leave the office angry at not obtaining the information they wanted. Nervous about this event, Mahmoud calls his boss multiple times. When Saidi finally answers, he tells the journalist to give true information to no one. In these chaotic circumstances, Nawal al-Wazir calls Saidi’s phone. Mahmoud picks up but hears no voice on the other side.

Two days later, Nawal al-Wazir comes to the office. She tells Mahmoud that Saidi has tricked him into believing that he is at a conference in Beirut. For her, Saidi is a serial liar. After mentioning that all they did together was collaborate on a movie plot, Nawal opens one of Saidi’s drawers with a special key and places all of its contents in a plastic bag. She reassures Mahmoud by telling him that Saidi gave her a key to recuperate her possessions, documents concerning her movie.

Nawal tells Mahmoud that she is taking her documents because “everything’s over” and that Mahmoud should be careful. Mahmoud does not understand what she is referring to. Finally, on her behest, he accompanies her to a more private place to discuss this mysterious matter further. On their way, they run into Sultan, Saidi’s driver, who gives Mahmoud a disapproving look.

At a fancy hotel cafeteria, Nawal tells Mahmoud that Saidi is evil. She met him through mutual acquaintances, and he offered to finance her first movie, which they worked on together. Saidi wanted to make a movie about the criminal elements inherent in everyone. Through these evil impulses, Saidi believed, humans have contributed to the creation of a monster that is now destroying them. Nawal mentions that she always rejected Saidi’s advances. Ultimately, when their movie project stalled, she decided to come pick up her belongings.

Nawal praises Mahmoud for his writing. Mahmoud, in the meantime, is obsessed with the idea of having sex with Nawal. This, he argues, will allow him to possess Nawal as Saidi once did—or, if what Nawal said was true, to surpass his boss. Mahmoud accepts to finish her screenplay—“just for you,” he says—and then holds her hand. Initially, Nawal does not react, although she asks the journalist to focus his attention on the screenplay. After Mahmoud leaves his hand on hers, she finally removes her hand and asks him why he is behaving in this way, after all she has told him about Saidi.

Mahmoud is confused by Nawal’s attitude. He does not understand why she wanted to discuss these issues in a private location. Overall, he finds that she sounds more like a businesswoman than a movie director. Confused by her secretive behavior, he concludes that she must be looking to turn him into a lover.

Hours later, Mahmoud gets drunk in a bar in order to forget about his meeting with Nawal. Earlier, as they were leaving the hotel, Mahmoud kissed Nawal in the elevator. Although she initially gave in to his embrace, she finally pushed him back when the elevator door opened. Before heading off, she angrily told him that she did not approve of his behavior and asked him to respect her. Mahmoud found her behavior confusing. He believed that she would have rejected him more aggressively if she hadn’t actually wanted him to kiss her.

Mahmoud leaves the bar and calls Sultan, Saidi’s driver, to take him home. Sultan, who is also drunk, apologizes in advance for intruding in Mahmoud’s life, but tells him that he must say something to him now because he is leaving the next day. He refers to seeing Mahmoud and Nawal together in the same car, as they were leaving the office. He tells Mahmoud that Nawal used to be Saidi’s lover and even wanted to marry him. He considers Nawal responsible for the current accusations against Saidi, saying that she used her political connections against the editor.

Finally, Sultan reveals that Saidi has actually left Baghdad to avoid Nawal, whom Sultan calls a “whore.” Sultan tells Mahmoud that Saidi is staying away from Baghdad while there is a legal case against him. The editor himself is currently in Amman, the capital of Jordan, waiting for Sultan to bring his mother and sisters there, because Saidi’s mother is seriously ill. When Mahmoud reaches his hotel room, he calls Saidi’s number in Beirut only to discover that the number is out of service.