Damage is compelling and damage is dynamic and nowhere is that more evident than in Michel Negroponte’s documentary, I’m Dangerous with Love.
Dimitri has the fire of a convert, the energy of a punk rocker, the vision of a poet, the looks of a welterweight boxer with more than a few loses. He's also very self-aware: he knows he’s involved in a highly illegal and dangerous activity, he gets off on this almost as much as helping his addict clients. He looks straight at the camera and tells us so. He has replaced his heroin high with the rush of skirting the law and cheating death. But when things go very badly during a treatment in a remote part of Canada, Dimitri has a crisis of faith. The film captures this harrowing scene of near-death and manages to have it both ways, to be sensational and yet not exploitive. It's a masterfully edited sequence. Afterwards Dimitri confesses, “Maybe that wasn’t me trying to help someone. Maybe that was ego trying to save somebody.”
And here’s where the film soars. It would have been a pedestrian portrait if we only followed Dimitri around North America and watched him treat addicts looking to kick but wanting to avoid withdrawal; if, as it had up to this point, only showed the old Dimitri, the sinner-junky (via archival footage) and the new Dimitri, the saint-renegade health care provider. But the documentary gods were kind to Negroponte. Dimitri goes to Gabon, West Africa, learns how a Bwiti shaman uses iboga (Ibogaine in its root bark state) in his rituals, and endures a gut-wrenching and mind-blowing initiation rite. And the director is there, capturing unforgettable images, showing Dimitri’s primal journey into a realm of spirituality through ritual. Dimitri's reset button has been pressed and he returns to NYC more convinced than ever of the benefits of Ibogaine. But he is no longer simply an administer of a controversial pharmaceutical, he is a healer. He understands the chemical must be accompanied by the spiritual. The people he’s trying to help have a spiritual void, one that must be filled if they’re going to get clean and stay clean, and Dimitri is there to help them fill it.
It’s not a perfect film, I could have done without the animated depictions of Negroponte’s trip on Ibogaine, but it’s an awfully good film that follows a passionate and flawed character, grapples with its huge themes—addiction, salvation, the importance of ritual—intelligently and subtly, and takes us to worlds most of us never see. You can’t ask for more from a documentary.
I’m Dangerous with Love opens at New York City’s IFC Center on Wednesday, January 12, 2011, with a wider release to follow.
