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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
"Paradise Now": Dodging potholes on the highway to hell
If "Ushpizin" takes us within the alien world of Hasidic Judaism and ultimately makes it seem completely normal, the journey of Hany Abu-Assad's "Paradise Now" moves in an opposite direction. The lives of Saïd (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), a couple of low-end auto mechanics in the West Bank town of Nablus, couldn't seem more ordinary. They're not desperately poor, and they don't seem to have been personally brutalized by the Israeli occupation. They sit around listening to Arab pop music, smoking a hookah and talking about girls. Then they get chosen for a "mission," meaning it is their great privilege to be wrapped in explosives and sent onto the streets of Tel Aviv, assigned to blow themselves up and take along as many strangers as possible.
"Paradise Now" isn't a comfortable viewing experience, but it isn't meant to be. Inevitably, people's reactions to this subject matter -- and this filmmaker's handling of it -- are all over the map. All I can say is that I found it a tremendously compelling existential thriller that kept me up late the night I saw it, and it has resonated in my brain ever since. It's an unstable combination of love story, almost farcical comedy and profound tragedy, but I feel pretty sure those ingredients are all deliberate. Abu-Assad has said in interviews that the film reflects his understanding that there is no single explanation or uniting narrative behind the epidemic of suicide bombings, that it is in some sense an inexplicable social phenomenon whose every instance is unique.
We catch glimpses of why Saïd and Khaled are willing (at least at first) to go along with this brilliant plan, but really only glimpses. The sinister ideologues who recruit them are important men in the Palestinian world, and repeatedly assure the duo how famous and glorious they will become. At the local video store, you can rent or buy tapes of the scripted statements movement martyrs read for the cameras before they fulfill their missions, along with battered copies of Hollywood and Bollywood movies. Neither of these guys seems especially religious, so that stuff seems almost like a footnote: Oh yeah, by the way? After you blow yourself into unrecognizable chunks of flesh? You'll be whisked straight to paradise!
More than anything else, life in the West Bank looks boring. Constrained and nearly always irritating and sometimes dangerous, yes, but mostly boring. By fulfilling a mission they apparently signed up for a long time ago, Saïd and Khaled are more than a couple of clowns working at the junkyard; they have an appointment with history. In his spooky portrayal of the overnight purification ritual prospective bombers undergo, Abu-Assad makes you feel something of the elation, even ascension, these two experience.
At the same time, there's no mythology in this portrayal of the Palestinian underworld. The leader of the unnamed group that assigns Saïd and Khaled their mission is a vainglorious blowhard; the filming of the video testimonial is hopelessly slipshod; the first attempt to smuggle the two through the fence into Israel is badly bungled. When the two men get separated, each has an opportunity to reflect on his past and his possible future: Khaled has a wife and child back in Nablus, Saïd a budding romance with Suha (Lubna Azabal), a Westernized intellectual who's recently returned from France. When one of them finally faces a busload of Jewish civilians, including several young children, what will he do?
If the will-they-or-won't-they question fuels much of the suspense in "Paradise Now," so does the general atmosphere of fear and irrationality. Abu-Assad and his crew shot on actual locations in Israel and the West Bank, working the military authorities with one hand and paramilitary guerrillas with the other. The clammy, chilly, fatal realism of this film is something you could never reproduce in another setting -- Saïd and Khaled's video testimonials were shot in a building where real bombers have documented themselves for posterity. These two guys and their handlers, like the soldiers trying to stop them, like the warring politicians on either side, are just cogs in a machine. They can do their part or break down, as the case may be, but the machine keeps on grinding.
"Paradise Now" opens Oct. 28 in New York and Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.
