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Divine intervention review
:. Director: Elia Suleiman
:. Starring: Elia Suleiman, Manal Khader
:. Running Time: 1:32
:. Year: 2002
:. Country: Palestine
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Something weird is going on in Nazareth. Father Christmas tries to escape the kids who plant a knife in his heart, a man systematically throws his garbage in his neighbors' backyard, while another one throw bottles at his neighbors' heads...
Chaos and crazy violent acts between neighbors multiply. Meanwhile, a Palestinian couple tries to love. He lives in Jerusalem and she is in Ramallah. The political context prohibits them to love each other freely and their intimacy stops at an Israeli military checkpoint located between the two cities. It is on a nearby parking lot that this contraband love blooms. The man is played by the director. His father is dying and he must fight and resist to help these two loves survive. In order to achieve this he and his girlfriend have use of subterfuges and audacity, such as this balloon with the effigy of Arafat which, carried by the wind, bravely crosses the very symbolic border.
The director's pro-Palestinian position is without ambiguity: he calls to resistance, in all its forms, against the Israeli oppressor. Of course, the violence exerted between the neighbors in the first part of film is a metaphor. These bad neighbor relationships refer to Palestinians' daily lives.
Suleiman makes a militant film that, as often the case, is a vehicle for excesses and sometimes extremism, provoking uneasiness.
Although the reception of film seemed good, a phantasmagoria sequence appears particularly tendentious. It is when a young woman fights Israeli soldiers during a training exercise. Taken as a target, she ends up killing them all one by one with different kinds of weapons. Does violence have to necessarily call for violence? Suleiman seems to believe it.
In this very autobiographical account appears the figure of the sick father. Suleiman dedicates his film to the memory of his own father who, we discover in the press kit, was tortured by the Israelis in 1948. Though Gitaï knew how to take into account the points of view from both sides in Kedma, Elia Suleiman doesn't fall into that dynamic. Taking into consideration what he had to live through, how could he be able of such an approach?
After the laughter caused by the absurdity of the situations that open the story, the film is radicalized brings a certain uneasiness. We are far from the chimerical peace process in this Manichean film as well as from the possible pacification between peoples that art should promote....
Sandrine Marques
 Movie Reviews: from 1998 to 2011
Movie Reviews since 2012
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