Waiting for Palestine

Hany Abu-Assad captures occupation's frustrations in Paradise Now.

By B. Ruby Rich

WHEN INDEPENDENT FILMMAKERS in the United States started out, their aim was to show an America that Hollywood never put onscreen: ordinary people, speaking how they really speak, shot in towns and cities far from back-lot facades. Today Palestinian filmmakers are often driven by a parallel mandate: to show the world the shape of Palestinian lives far from exploding bombs and breaking-news broadcasts.

Like his compatriots Elian Suleiman and Rashid Masharawi, Amsterdam-based Palestinian filmmaker Hany Abu-Assad is intent on capturing the inanities and insanities of life in occupied territory.

Paradise Now, his latest film (after Ford Transit and Rana's Wedding, among others), is a seriocomic thriller with a dose of romance. Shot in 35mm under virtually battlefront conditions, it resolutely keeps its lens – and our eyes, minds, and hearts – on the script. The result is far more engrossing, and ultimately far more deadly.

Cut to a junkyard. A pair of hapless mechanics are arguing with a customer, bashing his car bumper as he grows increasingly irate.

Illogic collides with illogic, tempers rise, and time goes by, slowly, absurdly. We could be watching a Beckett play. Only gradually does it dawn on the audience that this opening scene is being played out in a junkyard in Nablus, a place of missile targets and bomb explosions that we know only from TV news. Soon enough, the slacker friends to whom we've just begun to pay attention are tapped for a fatal honor: to be their town's next suicide bombers in a mission targeting Tel Aviv. Brilliantly, in a few deft scenes Abu-Assad and his cowriter-producer, Bero Beyer, have constructed an ingenious bait-and-switch for the viewer. Said and Khaled, our new onscreen chums, are transformed into the boogeymen that stalk the Western nightmare – the irrational representatives of a shadowy militia.

Paradise Now is as much about its characters' mind-sets as ours. In a way, Abu-Assad is building a bridge of subjectivity in the form of a madcap thriller. Central to his mission is the character of Suha, a Palestinian woman whose father was a famous martyr and who has recently returned from abroad (Morocco, Paris) adamantly opposed to violence as a weapon against violence. Her flirtation with Said is a ray of hope, yet we cannot help but fear that a happy ending won't be forthcoming.

His pal Khaled, meanwhile, plays with his kid sister as he contemplates the secret mission we desperately hope he won't carry out. Each young man struggles to reconcile ideas of honor that have a newly life-or-death urgency, paced to the demand of a ticking clock that literally won't wait.

These characters are much more than mouthpieces for ideas: They are believably quirky individuals with a taste for Alfa Romeos, ripe figs, or the latest music cassette. We learn a lot about the particular lives of the Nablus Palestinians – from the increasingly familiar indignities of checkpoint searches to the less-visible indignities of genealogical burdens. The psychological weight bearing down on Said, Khaled, and Suha comes gradually into focus, making the old adage regarding the "sins of the fathers" sound like a goddamn plot point.

Abu-Assad is very clever. He allows his compact cast of characters to articulate the complicated attitudes held by today's Palestinians, those still living in the West Bank or Gaza or the refugee camps, those living abroad, like himself, and even those in Israel (where he grew up and where much of his family still resides). At the same time, Paradise Now is clearly no apologia for suicide bombings: The ringleaders of the mission, a schoolteacher and an underground militant hero, are the closest the film comes to having villains – even when they display a grain of truth: "If we had planes, we wouldn't need martyrs."

Thankfully, Abu-Assad is just as smart about cinema, which he first experienced with an uncle, at the age of four, in Nazareth. Suha, the returned expatriate, asks whether Said is a film buff, only to be shocked by his answer: He was in the crowd that burned down the local cinema during the first intifada. Suha is partly our stand-in as she crashes headlong into the realities of Palestinian life, and partly an alter ego for Abu-Assad himself, defending her love of films and her outsider status. ("I'm a privileged Palestinian," he confessed to me during a recent interview in San Francisco. "But I have family still in Nazareth, cousins in Jenin. In Gaza too. And in Jordan.")

Abu-Assad's cinematic wit is most clearly on display in one astonishingly memorable scene in which the unnamed militant faction's leaders gather to record – with miscues and retakes – the videotapes of Said and Khalem's final speeches, complete with prepackaged texts and borrowed guns. In a later scene, Said and Suha come across just such "martyrs' videos" playing on a TV in a local shop. Unfazed by Suha's horrified disbelief, the shopkeeper recites the prices with the breezy nonchalance of a practiced middleman.