March 26, 2003

WE ARE LIVING in a time of banner headlines and propaganda, when the subtleties of truth are exterminated with the same hourly precision as are humans born into the "wrong" nation. In such a time the precious subjectivities of people with different cultures and distinct beliefs are obliterated or devalued in a calculated effort to drain meaning from their fate.

Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention hardly seems to merit such an op-ed opening, because it's a sophisticated cinephile's film, not an activist tract. And yet perhaps it does. Suleiman identifies himself as a Palestinian, always bracketing the word with context, as he wrote in a production diary published before his film was finished: "We, Palestinians living in Israel, are the shy ones. The inhibited. We act as if we were closet-case Palestinians." Born in Nazareth, once a Londoner, currently living in Paris, contemplating a move to Beirut, for a long time a New Yorker, and even briefly a Jerusalemite, Suleiman is a truly and multiply diasporic figure. His film, however, is neither documentary nor docudrama, nor even a Costa-Gavras-style feature designed to prompt international action. He doesn't follow the precepts of neorealism that Pacific Film Archive chief Edith Kramer and I agree remain the model for third-world cinemas. Rather, shooting in Nazareth and on the road to Jerusalem with a largely Israeli crew and an irreverent eye, Suleiman translates his riven, battle-weary homeland into a comic parable full of slapstick provocation.

Consider the opening: Santa Claus gets mugged. Yes, a man wearing a Santa Claus suit runs and runs, trying in vain to escape his pursuers, who leave him with a knife in his back, his gift-wrapped parcels scattered over a hillside devoid of witnesses. No explanation. Santa never appears again. A spoof on local violence? A gloss on racial intolerance? A salvo in an ongoing argument about symbolism versus action? It's a bracing opening for a film that fuses humor with inchoate rage but only much later deploys fantasy violence to make a political point, albeit a surreal one.

Divine Intervention begins in Suleiman's hometown of Nazareth, painting a sardonic picture of a town beset by malaise, petty feuds, and bad behavior. One neighbor throws garbage into another's yard, while a Sisyphus-like figure stashes rocks on a rooftop in a lunatic obsession that abruptly acquires meaning when he starts to lob his ammunition at the local police. Another neighbor casually extinguishes a firebomb in the front yard with the routine boredom of a suburbanite raking leaves. Quixotic aggressions occur with masterful comic timing, captured by a camera that unerringly stakes out the perfect position for its shot and makes that shot last for a satisfyingly apt duration. This is a filmmaker who knows his film history as well as his political history, an increasingly uncommon combination.

Distilling tragedy from tedium, Divine Intervention invites the viewer into a meditation on the absurdity of daily existence in today's Middle East, as seen from the perspective of Palestinians relentlessly occupied with occupation. Could anything be braver or more taboo at this moment than humor? It is a brave filmmaker who can set aside the easy posture of outrage to mine conundrums and contemplate deeper truths. It is a truly exceptional one who can do all of that without compromising the history that lies at the heart of the self.

For the PFA's Kramer, who presented the first of many exhibitions of Palestinian films there in 1997 with Suleiman as honored guest, Suleiman's signature style has everything to do with his biography: "He had the insight and brilliance to deal with something that was already very, very complicated and to take it on without diluting its complexity. I think it's connected to the complexity of his own identity issues as a Palestinian who was raised Christian inside Israel, identities which he deals with in such a sophisticated way. He's found a way to write and act and direct and deal with a very complicated world, all through irony."

So many comics exist in a universe of their own invention. Suleiman's ability to fuse the personal with the flagrantly political is a bravura reminder of how powerful satire can still be if undertaken with courage. Take the scene in which Suleiman's femme fatale, Manal Khader playing a character named only the Woman, sexily walks past an Israeli checkpoint, "slaying" them with the x-ray power of her forbidden beauty. Or the scene in which the ever melancholic Suleiman, playing a character thinly fictionalized as E.S., lets loose a balloon with the face of Yasser Arafat to float on the breeze past the checkpoint, across the invisible border, its physical freedom an affront to the Israeli soldiers enforcing confinement.

As E.S., Suleiman plays the role of a filmmaker struggling to figure out how to make his film. We can gauge his progress through the wall full of yellow Post-its with scrawled ideas for scenes. One speaks of a father's illness; later, his death (and Suleiman did indeed return home to care for his ailing father, who did die). Sure enough, there's Suleiman in a hospital of the absurd where an actor playing his father lays dying while, all around him, visitors, doctors, and nurses, even patients trailing their I.V.s, all anxiously puff on cigarettes. Sure, there's a touch of Beckett here. But this is no Waiting for Godot. Waiting for Sharon, maybe.

As he shifts locales and starts on the road to Jerusalem, Suleiman shifts tone from the sleepy resignation of backwater Nazareth to the border-town's smoldering rage. There, in a parking lot next to the Israeli checkpoint, is where E.S. and the Woman must meet, he driving from Jerusalem and she from Ramallah, courting in the shadow of the Israeli soldiers. It's a scene at once literal and symbolic, fascinating in its layers of ambiguity, and deeply seductive. But there's nothing "real" about it. Indeed, its unreality sets us up for the increasingly fanciful leaps the film undertakes.

One fabulous scene shows Israeli soldiers in a battle practice so choreographed that Claire Denis's dreamy Beau travail comes to mind. Just as the mind wanders to that benign comparison, Suleiman yanks us right back. He stages a Xena-like revenge fantasy in which the Woman acquires magical Hong Kong-style powers and destroys an entire regiment in the midst of its target practice against an imaginary Palestinian. Is this the "divine intervention" of the title? Certainly it's the scene that has provoked some viewers' and critics' protests, as though cinema were not precisely the place for such a fantasy of retribution. Perhaps it's her magic shield that's caused the trouble, bearing as it does an uncanny resemblance to the shape of a pre-1948 map of the area. Suleiman is nothing if not an agent provocateur, at every level, on-screen and off.

At its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, Divine Intervention instantly prompted comparisons to the work of Jacques Tati for its brilliant comic timing and for the genius of the static camera that makes all the world a stage and a pratfall merely a point of debate. Suleiman won not only applause and critical paeans but also an official jury prize and the Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique prize. At the televised awards ceremony, Suleiman was preceded by Michael Moore, who acknowledged his own award by speaking endlessly and extemporaneously in primary-school French as the festival audience squirmed in embarrassment. Then the award for Divine Intervention was announced. "Don't worry," a smiling Suleiman reassured his audience in English moments later. "I won't speak French." The audience roared with laughter, then Suleiman paused. "Or Arabic." A long pause, with no laughter. You couldn't ask for a better taste of the sensibility that shapes Divine Intervention.

Comparisons have continued beyond Suleiman and Tati. My own favorite is to Buster Keaton, whose visual gags and moribund humor are clear precedents. Others have noted an affinity with Otar Iosseliani or Nanni Moretti, other satirists who star in their own films. After seeing the film yet again for this article, another referent comes to mind: the late, great Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, the Cuban director behind Memories of Underdevelopment. It, too, is a film about absurdity and alienation, about intellectual life and displacement, about the indignity of having one's subjectivity colonized by political imperatives. It doesn't have the same humor, nor does Titon (as Gutiérrez Alea was known) appear as the protagonist, but the similarities are nonetheless plentiful. Were Titon still alive, I'm sure he would be thrilled with Divine Intervention.

But nobody has mentioned Bresson. Nobody except Suleiman, that is. In the fall of 2002, I was working for the Toronto International Film Festival. I'd invited Suleiman to show his film there, and the festival in turn asked me to conduct one of its "Dialogues: Talking with Pictures" sessions with him, in which a respected filmmaker chooses a film to discuss with the audience. You can imagine my sense of anticipation over his choice. He chose Robert Bresson's Pickpocket; I was fascinated. While I could see the comparisons between Suleiman's hold-the-beat timing and Bresson's poetic pacing, I wasn't clear at all on how to link the romantic naturalism of Pickpocket to Divine Intervention. But there was no need to worry, really: Suleiman had a straightforward explanation. He wanted to see Pickpocket again out of curiosity. When he'd left Nazareth for London, he'd supported himself as a thief and retained a deep appreciation for Bresson's how-to scenes of the pickpocket trade.

Well, that's what he said then. Now I notice he's begun to slip the adjective Bressonian into his explanations of his work. And he's not wrong. The melancholy that haunts Suleiman's character and causes his film to bear the subtitle "Chronicle of Love and Pain" does appear in Bresson's unlucky characters as well, dooming them despite their best/worst efforts. In Divine Intervention and in Suleiman's equally extraordinary earlier films (deconstructed parables all, from the feature Chronicle of a Disappearance all the way back to his first shorts, "Homage by Assassination" and "Introduction to the End of an Argument"). It's no accident that the first short was made during the first Gulf War, a time when the sight of a computer screen on the movie screen was still a novelty and when the evidence of a keyboard with Arabic letters was cause for amazement.

The deadpan absurdity with which Suleiman's characters view the world is a perfectly logical response to the psychopathological environment known as the Middle East, Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, the occupied territories, Ramallah, Jerusalem, and so on and so on. (And, filmmakers take note, as the United States of March 2003, for that matter.) Suleiman's seen-it-all visage is a mirror held up to his reality, but more than a mirror, it's always reactive, hyperreactive, fighting brutality with imagination. Has there ever been a better argument for the necessity and efficacy of culture? Of course, in his film, Suleiman makes sure imagination comes armed. When E.S. throws an apricot pit out the car window while driving down a road, the nearby Israeli tank bursts into flames. "Today I exploded an Israeli tank," he wrote in his production chronicle. Not really, though: it was all staged – a French tank filmed on French soil and painted to look like an Israeli one. More and more, U.S. foreign policy, world events, and "embedded" journalism conspire to make us understand, perfectly.

The "violence" in Divine Intervention is playful, cartoonish, fantastical, devoid even of movie ketchup-blood and splatter-film body display. No, this is play-acting. And all throughout, Suleiman's tone is confidential and intimate, as though he's invited us along as a treasured friend to share his front-row seat on history. It's due to the tone, I suspect, that Divine Intervention feels more like a diary than like a diatribe. The newest generation of Palestinian films shares this tone, as the shocking violence of daily life is increasingly held offscreen lest its numbing regularity overwhelm the smaller dramas that drift in its wake. The New Directors/New Films Festival in New York this month shows Rashid Masharawi's Ticket to Jerusalem, a calmly absurdist chronicle of daily life by a Palestinian who remained in Ramallah to shoot films and show them. In Paris last fall the Rencontres Festival at the Forum des Images showed Obor Kalandia, an up-close camcorder look at domestic life during the siege of Ramallah by New York University-educated Palestinian filmmaker Sobhi al-Zobaidi. One of the "jokes" occurs in a voice-over in which the filmmaker remembers deciding to live in this particular house because it was right across the street from Arafat's compound, "so it would be safe." How times change.

As a Jew living in America, I must say the Palestinian cinema today moves me like no other. This handful of films I've been able to see, all released in the past year, share a power and grace, a wisdom and generosity, that I've never seen in any other "national" cinema. Yes, national. I use the word deliberately, if cautiously, because of the recent decision by our esteemed Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (see "Is It Academic?," 3/19/03). Somehow I had missed the whole controversy, so I had to catch up on Web pages and in a conversation with Suleiman himself. Caught on his cell phone, traveling as always, he was in Berlin and about to go to Beirut. "Haven't you heard?" he asked, surprised at my ignorance. "There's been an uproar." Perhaps the distributor didn't mention it to me because Suleiman had refused to talk to the press about it anymore. In the end, of course, he couldn't help himself. "First they said we couldn't submit the film in the foreign-film category because there's no such country as Palestine. Then they said we weren't eligible because we hadn't submitted the film." The press has been all over the story, justly excoriating the Academy for its lockstep politics that seemed to be following the tracks of U.S. foreign policy. In an uncharacteristically optimistic mood, Suleiman chooses to see things differently. For him, the mixed messages are a good sign. "It shows the decision wasn't ideological. They were too confused."