IN THE DARK/Jonathan Richards
DIVINE INTERVENTION
Directed by Elia Suleiman
Not Rated, 89 minutes
In Arabic and Hebrew with subtitles
Elia Suleiman's latest feature is a bizarrely comic series of fragmented reflections on life in the Israeli-Palestinian war zone. In a choppy style similar to his acclaimed "Chronicle of a Disappearance" (1996), he uses humor like morphine, to dull and distance the pain, and the result is a movie that for the most part is seen and felt from a long way off. Much of it is silent, much of it is in long shot, much of it is incomprehensible in specific terms. Some of it is very funny.
There is no continuing narrative, just a crazy quilt of vignettes, set up and revisited until they have run their course. Sometimes the point is clear, sometimes obscure. The movie opens with Santa Claus running across a Palestinian landscape, pursued by a gang of boys. His breathing is ragged. Toys spill from his pack. A knife protrudes from his chest.
Other bits involve a man waiting for a bus that he knows isn't coming; patients, doctors, and staff taking a mass cigarette break in the corridors of a hospital; a man driving down the street waving to his neighbors and cursing them under his breath; a tourist asking directions from an Israeli cop, who brings a shackled and blindfolded prisoner out from the back of the paddywagon to help. A car screeches past a house on a residential street and the driver hurls a firebomb, and the homeowner resignedly comes out and extinguishes the blaze, as if he's done it many times.
In one of the most pointed vignettes, a man repeatedly tosses his garbage over a neighbor's wall, and is offended when she finally starts tossing it back into his yard.
"Neighbor, why do you toss your garbage into my yard? Aren't you ashamed?"
"The garbage I throw in your yard is the garbage you threw in my yard."
"Yes, but it's still shameful. You should have spoken to me about it. Neighbors should respect each other."
As with last year's Oscar-winning "No Man's Land" (Bosnia), Suleiman chooses satire as his blade to fillet the absurdities of war. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, whose hopelessness yawns wider and deeper now that Washington has lost interest in it, is shown as a backdrop against which life goes on because life has no choice, although life gets a little crazier and a little edgier as a result.
Suleiman himself plays the closest thing this movie has to a main character, a sad-eyed observer named E.S., who may be a filmmaker, and whose apartment wall is covered with dozens of neatly-arranged yellow Post-Its containing what may be scenes from his projected movie. He lives in Jerusalem, and drives to a field next to an Israeli checkpoint to meet his girlfriend (journalist Manal Khader in her film debut), where they sit wordlessly entwining hands and watching the follies that unfold at the checkpoint of the absurd. Suleiman's deadpan comic style has been compared to that of the late Jacques Tati ("Mr. Hulot's Holiday"), who was honored at last year's Cannes Film Festival where "Divine Intervention" won the Jury Prize.
An indication of Suleiman's wry sense of humor at work comes in his repeated use on the soundtrack of Arab pop diva Natacha Atlas's rendition of the Screamin' Jay Hawkins rock 'n roll classic, "I Put a Spell on You". And a clue to his subversiveness is seen in a beguilingly ambiguous visual in which he releases a helium balloon bearing the grinning visage of Yasser Arafat to drift over the Israeli checkpoint, past confounded Israeli soldiers who debate whether to shoot it down. The inflated, gas-filled Arafat finally comes to rest over Al Aksa mosque on the Temple Mount.
There are a few scenes of overt violence. In one, E.S. drives along eating a peach, and when he tosses the pit from his car window it blows up an Israeli tank by the side of the road. In the most extended sequence of the film, a Palestinian woman duels ninja-style with an Israeli militia squad at a target range, pirouetting and levitating à la "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", deflecting and controlling bullets, and ultimately destroying her antagonists. But most of the violence is of the dull, accretive sort, built up and built in to the fabric of everyday life, so that it becomes a part of life that is taken for granted even as it frays nerves and forms character.
The point of view is Palestinian, but the picture is general enough and the scope is broad enough to tar everyone involved, and to suggest that by now there is folly and wrongheadedness enough to go around.
========== X-RAMR-ID: 34194 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 846314 X-RT-TitleID: 1119800 X-RT-SourceID: 896 X-RT-AuthorID: 2779
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews