Divine Intervention
**
Cinema
Reviews - Week of February 21, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 15. France/
Morocco/ Germany/ Palestine. 100 minutes. Written and directed by Elia Suleiman.
Starring Elia Suleiman, Emma Boltanski, Amer Daher, Jamel Daher, Nayef Fahoum
Daher, George Ibrahim, Manal Khader.
The settings and imagery of "Divine
Intervention" suggest that the movie has something to say about the
Israel-Palestine conflict. What the message is, I have no idea. This is a
good-looking film, with moments of arresting invention, but the purposes
of the characters and the meanings they represent are buried so obliquely
that the movie seems to ask for praise without doing its job.
The opening sequence shows a guy in a Santa Claus
suit being chased by a gang of youths. He throws presents at them, hoping
to trip the trail. At the end of the scene, it is revealed he has a knife
stuck in his chest, and he collapses to his death. Cut to a quiet Nazareth
neighbourhood, where old guys sit on their favourite bench, mopingly observing
their surroundings. A kid plays with a football. A grumpy resident pierces
it. One man waits at a bus stop, despite the cautions of a bemused and agitated
local: "There is no bus!"
These scenes are mostly silent, and punctuated
by visual ironies. They're amusing, to a degree, and sometimes even hilarious,
but eventually they get repetitive. The first hour of "Divine Intervention"
plays like an endurance test for deadpan comedy; someone should have told
the director that there's a difference between deadpan and dead, and there's
only so many bleak visual gags and faces of strained blankness that an audience
can take before becoming restless.
At about the halfway point, in comes a guy named
E.S., who is played by the writer-director, Elia Suleiman. He sits looking
morose in a car at the Jerusalem-Ramallah checkpoint, and we attempt to guess
what he's up to. The end of the movie reveals how his story relates to the
quiet early scenes, and it's clearly supposed to have some symbolic significance,
but you know, I just couldn't figure it out.
The moments of inspiration are so good that you
wonder why the whole movie didn't consist of similar stuff. One of the few
scenes set to music sees the Palestinian E.S. stop at traffic lights and
hold up the cars behind, simply to have a staring match with the guy to the
left, who drives a car decorated in provocatively over-the-top Israeli
decoration. There's a simple but effective absurdist scene where E.S. and
his girl get through the checkpoint by distracting soldiers with a red balloon
depicting the face of Yasser Arafat. The film's most breathtaking sequence
(and the one being used to advertise it) shows Israeli target practice develop
into a dance routine, a target turn into a woman, the woman magically hail
the bullets that come her way and then slam a Palestinian flag imprint onto
the sand below.
"Divine Intervention" is not exactly bad -- it's
amusing at times, with terrific flights of fancy, and it does at least attempt
to bring an important time and place to the screen with a mixture of sobriety
and humour. But what does it add up to? You could tell me that it's all about
general mess, because the Middle Eastern conflict is one of confounding farcical
madness, but that's a cop-out. This movie is so busy being clever, in ways
that don't fit with each other, that it is unable to communicate. At least
it made a great trailer.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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