Cannes Notebook: Worldly Violence and Confusion
By A. O. SCOTT
...Amos Gitai's "Kedma," which was shown early in the festival, also travels back in time to shed light on the troubles of the present. The film takes place in May 1948 in the days leading up to Israel's declaration of statehood and the war that followed. The title, which means "Toward the Orient," is the name of a boat carrying refugees from Europe.
Mr. Gitai follows a polyglot group, survivors of the ghettoes and the death camps as they arrive in a strange and harsh new land with new enemies. "They had to be very optimistic first of all to survive," Mr. Gitai said in an interview, "I think they wanted to basically settle down, finally to rest. But no, history will kidnap them again and send them to another battlefield."
At one point the newcomers and the Haganah fighters who have rescued them cross paths with the dispossessed residents of an Arab village. "Where are you going?" a Russian refugee asks. "We're fleeing." "From whom?" "The Jews, and you?" The Russian replies, "I'm fleeing." "Who from?" "The British."
The film, at once humane and deeply pessimistic, attempts to grapple with the tragic contradictions at the core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The foundation of the state of Israel, viewed by many Jews as a heroic event (and sentimentalized in films like Otto Preminger's "Exodus") is remembered by Palestinians as al-nakba - the catastrophe.
"If you open the daily paper today," Mr. Gitai said, "1948 will be all over the place." The movie concludes with two monologues, one by a Palestinian farmer whose donkey has been expropriated to transport a wounded Jewish fighter and the other by one of the refugees, driven nearly to madness by everything he has seen. The words the characters speak are taken from literary texts of the period, by the Palestinian poet Tawfik Zayad and the Zionist writer Haim Azaz. They are both expressions of rage against the cruelty of history, and they arrive in "Kedma" with an uncanny force, seeming to speak directly to the anguish and bitterness of today.
Therefore it is somewhat remarkable that the two Palestinian films shown in Cannes during the first week of the festival can both be described as comedies. "Rana's Wedding: Jerusalem, Another Day," the first feature directed by Hany Abu-Assad, was shown as part of Critics' Week, a diverse program of films by young and emerging directors, which takes place alongside the main festival but is not affiliated with it.
The movie chronicles a single, hectic day in which the heroine, facing a strict (if slightly contrived) deadline, tries to marry her boyfriend, an event that finally occurs inside a car stranded at an Israeli military checkpoint. In the course of her frenzied last-minute planning, Rana encounters panicky soldiers and stone-throwing boys, a funeral procession and a series of roadblocks. Rana, played by Clara Khoury, shows great pluck and persistence, and her adventures lead you to a paradoxical conclusion: in her circumstances - living under occupation, surrounded by the threat of violence - it is impossible to live a normal life and yet also impossible not to.
This is also in a way the moral of Elia Sulieman's "Divine Intervention," one of the most interesting films shown in competition so far. Perhaps unfairly (but also perhaps inevitably) one expects to be immediately confronted with painful political questions. But for a while at least the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian intifada are nowhere in sight. Instead we get Santa Claus, an incongruously bright red figure in an olive-drab landscape, running from a group of young men. (We will see him again later in the hospital.)
What follows are a series of dry, hilarious comic set pieces in a quiet, middle-class section of Nazareth. Mr. Sulieman, who shows up after a while playing a character called E. S. (and who never smiles or utters a word) has the sorrowful, placid countenance of a Palestinian Buster Keaton, and his directorial method owes much to classic silent comedy. Using very few camera movements, he constructs short, rigorous visual jokes, the links between them becoming apparent only gradually. Most of the gags, which like all slapstick have an undercurrent of mayhem, involve neighbors, which the film defines as people who can barely tolerate each other's existence but who must nonetheless live side by side.
Aha, you think to yourself, it's a metaphor. But just at this moment the scenes start to become more pointed, more literal and more unsettling. A house is sprayed with gunfire. Soldiers stand at checkpoints, leveling their guns at the drivers waiting to pass through (and also at a red balloon imprinted with the smiling likeness of Yasir Arafat).
Behind Mr. Sulieman's implacable demeanor and visual decorum you detect an unmistakable rage, which reaches its climax in a bizarre martial-arts musical sequence that is at once chilling and ridiculous and seems to be both an expression of absolute rage and a parody of the fantasies that rage can provoke. And then one last joke. E. S. and his mother (played by the director's mother) sit on the sofa, staring at a pressure cooker steaming away on the stove. "Perhaps we should turn it off now," she says. Neither one moves. The screen goes dark....
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/21/movies/21XCANN.html> -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>