Sacha Baron Cohen: he's got Sadam's mustache down -- now for the costume

Sacha Baron Cohen has announced that his next film will be based on the Iraqi novel Zabibah and the King, written by Saddam Hussein.

As noted in a Guardian report by Xan Brooks,

The book charts the chaste love affair between a medieval monarch and the soulful Zabibah, who lives unhappily with her abusive husband. But what appears, at first glance, to be a sweet, simple folk tale actually contains pools of hidden meaning. It was intended to be read as an allegory for Iraq in the years following the first Gulf war, with the king representing Saddam, Zabibah embodying the Iraqi people and her husband standing in for the cruel and evil US forces.

Saddam’s drama hits its crescendo when Zabibah is sexually assaulted by a mysterious figure who turns out to be her spouse. “Rape is the most serious of crimes,” she explains helpfully. “Whether it is a man raping a woman or invading armies raping the homeland.” Zabibah is later tragically killed on January 17, the date of the US’s first aerial bombardment of Baghdad in 1991.

The book, and a sequel, were supposedly huge bestsellers in Iraq, although the late Melville House author Malcolm MacPherson, a Newsweek reporter who lived in Hussein’s occupied palace in the early days of the war, told us, in a description he repeated in his book Hocus Potus, that it was full of pallet after pallet of the book.

Previously made into a 20-part Iraqi TV miniseries, the Guardian report says the Baron Cohen version will be retitled The Dictator, produced by Paramount-backed and “overseen by Larry Charles, who directed Baron Cohen on the feature-length Borat and Brüno outings.” It’s scheduled to hit theaters in May, 2012.