The Ambassador

The Ambassador

When I realized that everyone in the film was just as dishonest, venal and corrupt as they seemed including the director is when I knew “The Ambassador” was an actual documentary, and not a fraud. The Danish filmmaker Mads Bruegger stars as Mads Cortzen, a man who does not exist but who is no more fabricated than every other character in this incredible stunt.

Let’s call him Mads for short, since both Bruegger and “Cortzen” are taking the same real risks. To get rich quick, according to Mads, one way is to use a genuine diplomatic passport to travel to a country like the Central African Republic and carry out a briefcase full of diamonds. Your immunity will get you straight through customs, and you’re home free. And it’s best done using “envelopes of happiness” as bribes because everyone he meets is happily (even openly) bribable.

Beginning in Europe, he uses two brokers (who are apparently quite real) to line up phony diplomatic credentials from Liberia. He arrives in the Central African Republic saying that if the Congo was Joseph Conrad’s “heart of darkness,” then the CAR is its spleen. There he and his secretary (Eva Jakobsen) obtain a translator and introductions to the minister of state security, relatives of the president and owner Dalkia Gilbert). They’re all real people.

He films them with hidden video mini-cams that could be anywhere: walls, furniture, briefcases, clothing we don’t know. For much of this section I assumed it was mockumentary; the “hidden cam” footage seemed so much like a special effect No. It finally dawned on me with cold certainty: The fearless Mads had introduced himself into this situation in order to make this film. He could easily get himself killed; his danger is as gripping as the corruption he observes. Mads has cojones, or whatever they call them in Denmark.

To cut to the chase: Everyone he meets is on the take, often from each other. There’s not a word you can believe. He actually visits the diamond mine that he and Gilbert will exploit to see if it even exists. And dammit, it does. In South Africa, I visited an actual diamond mine owned by De Beers; it was a high tech operation deep in the earth. In the CAR, young men and boys stand knee-deep in muddy water and shovel soil into a sieve to extract the diamonds. It’s an open secret that diamonds would not be rare if their global supply were not ruthlessly curtailed by an international cartel. Diamonds from unsettled or war-torn nations move under the radar, and are known as blood diamonds.

Now, Mads is walking through a maze of corruption, passing out thousands in bribes, and worrying because he still doesn’t have his Liberian credentials. The man can’t be reached: “I’m in a room where I can’t talk right now.” Even the translator could be screwing him over. As a front, he’s gone through the motions of starting a match factory Gilbert introduces him to a pygmy tribe that he can train as match-makers and given two “personal pygmies” named Albert and Bernard as companions; they wind up being the only two men in the CAR that he can trust.

(Since there never was going to be a match factory, Albert and Bernard can’t trust him.) You could see how this might’ve been made into a 1950s British comedy. This is all real. Mads plays “himself” as a shaved-head poker-faced imperturbable wheeler-dealer who wears mirrored sunglasses and safari boots throughout the film and smokes in just about every scene; he starts with little cigars, then larger cigars, then cigarettes, then cigarettes in an ivory holder; finally it’s a Meerschaum pipe but I told myself if he started using snuff he knows he’s going to die.

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