Album Reviews
Movies
Concert Reviews
Movie Resources
Concert Reviews
Book Reviews

Top 10
Resources
Contact Us

The last few years have brought a dramatic increase in the number of movies that depict the Palestinian viewpoint of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. For a variety of reasons, primarily economic, most of those have been either documentaries or fiction films with documentary elements. The rare exceptions--_Divine Intervention_ being the prominent example--have tended toward the surreal, as if creating a straight-forward narrative about the Palestinian situation was almost impossible. As you know, I like documentaries, so I haven't been complaining. But documentaries are limited by their source material, and the Palestinian ones have tended to focus on the same themes and people. Besides, documentaries aren't a substitute for storytelling, they're a complement. And when the storytelling is as good as it is in Paradise Now, a new film from director Hany Abu-Assad, narrative filmmaking can venture into places documentaries can't go.

Hany Abu-Assad's last film was the compelling Rana's Wedding, but this one is even more powerful. It focuses on two young Palestinians, Khaled and Said, who've been chosen to be the next pair of suicide bombers. We don't know that at first. We initially see them working at a car repair shop/junkyard, where they engage in a humorous argument with a customer over whether a car is tilted. Later, Said, the more mild-mannered of the two, flirts with a pretty woman named Suha, who's just returned from overseas. And as we watch Khaled and Said sit on a hill overlooking Nablus, dancing to music and joking about their lot in life, the films sets us up to expect a straight-ahead buddy movie.

It's a huge surprise, then, when a couple scenes later Said is approached in a dark alley and notified that he and Khaled have been chosen for a suicide bombing the following day. It's a surprise for Said, too, though he signed up for the "mission" months ago. Things have changed, however, what with the return of Suha and the hopes of a different future. Nonetheless, Said agrees to go through with it and spends his last night with his family, who are oblivious to his plans.

The last two-thirds of the movie focuses on whether the two men will actually go through with the bombing. Paradise Now is more suspenseful than any traditional thriller you'll see all year. There are twists and turns, with periods of waiting punctuated by genuinely exciting chase sequences. The movie doesn't have the huge explosions and fancy special effects of a blockbuster, but it does have something those generic films lack--genuine uncertainty. Because the movie doesn't telegraph the outcome, there are so many points when we're on the edge of our seats, hoping that Said will make the right decision. In one unbearably tense moment, Said stands at a settler bus stop, and we watch him struggle with whether to get on the bus.

Mixed in with the suspense is a series of conversations between Said, Khaled, and Suha (who gets wrapped up in the situation). The two men argue that the bombings are not only justified but the only logical approach. "The occupation defines the resistance," Said remarks at one point. Suha takes an entirely different tack, stressing that the Palestinians must take the moral high ground and that there are other ways to keep the resistance going. Because these discussions are so critical to the action, they move the narrative along rather than slowing it to a stop, as most political conversations might.

In that respect, they're even more effective in presenting two sides of the Palestinian point of view than Abu-Assad's earlier documentary Ford Transit. That film featured various people on a mini-van taxi talking about their experiences as Palestinians, though one or two Israelis were included. But because the situation seemed contrived (or carefully edited), it didn't have the power that the same conversations do in Paradise Now. In a strange way, fiction becomes truer than reality. Even this film's schematic conventions--the father of one character was a famous "martyr," another's father was a collaborator who was executed--serve to illuminate both the setting and the people involved.

Not that the audience is likely to accept the suicide bombers' rationales. The worldview, presented in one full-length "martyr's statement," is deeply unsettling. It's the logic of people who've convinced themselves they're already dead. The fact that these videotaped statements are rented out at Palestinian stores is even more unsettling. But worst of all is that the videotaped "confessions" of collaborators about to be executed are apparently even more popular.

What Paradise Now does accomplish, though, is present a close-up on a world we usually see only from a distance. We're not invited to identify with the characters' actions, and this is not a movie likely to make anyone more sympathetic to Palestinian terrorists. Yet, it does have the effect of encapsulating a society more clearly than many documentaries could do. And it does so in a suspenseful thriller that works on its own terms. Paradise Now opens this Friday. 

 J. Robert Parks

What is the psychological make-up of a suicide bomber? Scriptwriters Hany Abu-Assad and Bero Beyer give us two men, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) who decide to make a statement by deliberately giving their lives in the process of taking other lives. Paradise Now is set in the West Bank town of Nablus, by the border of Israel. People live in poverty.

Many members of the West Bank population believe in peaceful means to achieve harmony with Israel. Others believe in violence and what better method of violence than to use an ordinary person as a weapon. Said and Khaled, appear ambitionless, enjoy smoking a water pipe, meeting girls and family life. The men had been approached by Jamel (Amer Hiehel) to embark on a holy mission. Unfortunately, this is to become a human bomb. During the 24 hours prior to their mission, the men enjoy family life and Said becomes friendly with a girl (Lubna Azabaf). The men go into destruct mode as they are video taped as heroes reading political statements then wear business suits to disguise themselves as people going to a wedding. Their “handlers” are not suicide bombers, but fill the heads of Said and Khaled with tales of angels immediately taking them from the bomb scene into heaven. “You will recognize them,” Amer states. A Valhalla of the desert. The men become separated and then for a third of the film, chase from one area of the town to another as Khaled searches for Said and they try to decide whether to complete the mission or not. The ending is a surprise.

Bits of information are added. The past of their families include the execution of a collaborator. Both men expressed wishes to sometime die next to their best friend. The political scene is moving too slow for them and Said and Khaled do not consider the implication of what would happen to their clueless families when they die.

The film gives the audience a look into the mindset of Said and Khaled. They grew up in poverty and see no way out for themselves. However, they aren’t seriously looking either and at first appear as two young men who haven’t quite matured. Acting is well done, particularly by Kais Nashef as Said, who reveals a hardened face when his beard is shaved off. It is later when the bomb belts are strapped on that another transformation takes place. This is the real thing.

Paradise Now has statements about the Palestinian situation in the West Bank and comments on checkpoints. The film is one explanation of life in the Middle East. There is an old saying about an angel who dances on the head of a pin. One wonders if Khaled and Said knew of that angel's predicament when they signed up.

Copyright 2005 Marie Asner

Submitted 11/15/05