Paradise NowReview by Peter T. Chattaway |
posted 11/18/2005
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It shouldn't have to be spelled out like this, but in today's political climate, you never know—so, just to be clear, deliberate attacks against civilians are an unmitigated evil. But the people who commit these deeds are still made in the image of God. So when a film like Paradise Now—a fictional story about two Palestinian suicide bombers—comes along, the viewer is torn between two impulses: on the one hand, you hope the film will allow the atrocity to be seen for what it is, but on the other, you hope it will allow the characters' humanity to come through, in all its dimensions, without reducing their situation to propaganda. The trick, for filmmaker and audience alike, is, as always, to love the sinner but hate the sin.
When we first meet Khaled and Said, they're just good buddies with no direction in life
This can be especially complicated when the film focuses so narrowly, as this one does, on the persons who are planning to commit the crime. While this approach does allow us to get to know them as people, it doesn't necessarily allow us to get a sense of the broader political forces at work. Saïd (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman)—lifelong friends who have asked to be sent on a suicide mission together—occasionally allude to the fact that they are suffering for something that happened in their grandparents' generation, but what they mean by that, exactly, is never really spelled out. (Is it Israel's occupation of the West Bank, which was part of neighboring Jordan until the Six-Day War in 1967? Does it go back even further than that, to the creation of the Israeli state in 1948?) All that matters to them is that Israel is an oppressive occupying force that has shamed their people.
Shame is the key idea; as portrayed here, the suicide bombings have little tactical value, but are intended primarily as a way to regain both personal and national honor—as a way to prove one's loyalty to one's tribe, and as a way to demonstrate that the strong cannot always dominate the weak. One of the more striking features of this film is the way director Hany Abu-Assad charts the final hours of a suicide bomber's life: their heads are shaved, their bodies scrubbed, and their images put on posters—posters which, they are told, will bring glory to them and their families long after they have died. All this attention before their deaths, and the promise of even more attention afterwards, has a powerful psychological effect. After the bombs are strapped to his torso, Khaled spins on his heel and gestures as though he were a gunslinger; he seems to glory in the thought that he is like a cowboy, apparently forgetting that the hero idealized in so many Westerns followed a code of honor that forbade him to shoot anyone in the back, or anyone who was unarmed.
Said and Khaled consider their destiny
Religious motives are somewhere in there too, but almost as an afterthought. Khaled asks Jamal (Amer Hlehel), one of the higher-ups who has orchestrated the attack, what will happen after he and Saïd die, and Jamal looks away and, not very convincingly, mumbles something about angels coming to pick them up. More peculiar is the scene of Saïd and Khaled sharing their last meal with 11 of their associates; Abu-Assad depicts them all sitting on one side of a long string of tables, an obvious homage to Leonardo Da Vinci's The Last Supper. While a significant proportion of the Palestinian population—including Yasser Arafat's widow—is, indeed, of Christian heritage, it is not an image one ordinarily associates with Muslim terrorists. Does it reflect how they see themselves, or does it reflect how the filmmakers see them? Is it a sincere nod to the bombers' "martyrdom," or is it intended as irony? Jesus, after all, achieved our salvation by embracing the shame of the Cross.
Suha (Lubna Azabal) tries to bring a moderate voice into Said's life
As in so many Westerns, so here: the voices that call on our heroes to abandon violence are primarily female. Saïd's widowed mother (Hiam Abbas), who is unaware of her son's plans—he tells her he has found a job in Tel Aviv—holds out hope that things will get better for them. "The world changes," she tells him. "Everything changes, except God. You'll see." Saïd and Khaled also befriend Suha (Lubna Azabal), the daughter of a "martyred" Palestinian who explicitly says she wishes her father still had life, rather than glory. Saïd seems to be attracted to her, but every society has its pecking order, and he is held back by the knowledge that she comes from a higher social or economic class than he does.
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