Hi!

I found this review quite interesting and thought some L'ers might too:


http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/apr2003/divi-a14.shtml

On love and pain

Divine Intervention, a film by Elia Suleiman

By Joanne Laurier
14 April 2003

Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s new film Divine Intervention, also
known as Chronicle of Love and Pain, is an extraordinary effort using the
concrete, surreal and abstract to expose the humiliations suffered by
Palestinians living in Israel and their emotional consequences.
Disgracefully, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences discouraged
the producer of Suleiman’s film from submitting it for a best foreign
language film award on the grounds that Palestine was not a recognized
country!

Suleiman was born in Nazareth in 1960, lived in New York City between 1981
and 1993 and returned home in 1994 when the European Commission allowed him
the opportunity to develop a Film and Media Department in Bir Zeit
University.

The opening segment of the film takes place in a middle-class Palestinian
neighborhood in Nazareth. A series of vignettes reveal that in a relatively
affluent community seemingly distant from the intifada, anger, seething
frustration and resentment form the basis of all inter-personal
relationships.

A man driving a car smilingly acknowledges acquaintances on the street,
while muttering obscenities under his breath about each one. An elderly man
deflates a young boy’s soccer ball every time it lands on his roof and, as
a consequence, repeatedly suffers beatings by the boy’s family. Another man
ritualistically throws his garbage into his neighbor’s garden, then berates
her with a false moralizing when she angrily throws it back. A group of
boys beat and then shoot, with manic gusto, an unfortunate creature that
has invaded their turf. The invader turns out to be nothing more than a
snake. These portrayals subvert expectations, and reveal a community that
has great difficulty achieving any kind of solidarity.

We see the effects, more or less, before we see the causes. The reality of
an oppressed people, imprisoned on its own territory, begins to emerge,
sometimes tragi-comically. A foreign tourist asks an Israeli policeman the
way to the Holy Sepulcher. Unable to help her, the cop pulls a handcuffed
and blindfolded Palestinian from the back of the van to provide the
information.

Ever-present cigarettes create the disturbing impression that the film’s
characters are possessed by a collective death wish. A chilling hospital
scene depicts zombified patients walking up and down a small corridor in
rhythmic despair, pushing their IV stands and furiously puffing away on
their oral fixatives.

These tableaux have a cumulative weight as the film examines the
psychological and emotional traumas of a population that has been subjected
for decades to inhuman levels of military and police repression, and is
increasingly the object of deadly ethnic cleansing. The film’s characters
convey a level of tension that could only be the product of a near-insane
existence. Divine Intervention’s first sequence shows a man dressed in a
Santa Claus outfit, toting a bag of presents and running for his life from
a group of rock-throwing youth. The scene is baffling unless viewed as an
indicator of an environment that has become brutal and irrational.

The film eventually introduces ES, the filmmaker (played by Suleiman), who
has come from abroad to tend to his ailing father. ES’s father is a well-
drawn character. One of the most disgruntled personalities in the movie, he
is small businessman—a recognizable social type—who has been financially
ruined and stripped of the objects of his life’s efforts (his welding shop
has been closed down and his home furnishings repossessed). The external
unraveling produces an internal collapse as he falls over from heart
trouble next to a pile of unpaid bills.

At this point, Divine Intervention unfolds as the creation of ES, with the
segments noted down on Post-Its methodically arranged on his apartment
wall. ES negotiates the world with a stony, Buster Keatonesque stare,
permanently etched with pathos. His face is as powerful an expression of
the Palestinian human nightmare as any combination of elements in the film.

Silence now “animates” the film and fantasy emerges as the tool of re-
imagining the Palestinian plight. This is a world where ES can casually
throw an apricot pit at an Israeli tank and blow it up. It’s a world where
a beautiful woman, “dressed to kill,” can sashay past a military checkpoint
and collapse the lookout tower simply through the strength of her aura. The
musical theme for this segment is a Palestinian version of Screamin’ Jay
Hawkins’ song, “I Put a Spell on You.”

Then there is the matter of the checkpoints, the focal point of repression
and demeanment. ES loves the beautiful girl (he tells her that on a Post-
it). He is from Jerusalem and she from Ramallah. Their romance takes place
at the no-man’s land area of the Al-Ram checkpoint, which separates the two
cities. Holding hands in a parked car is the only available form of
courtship. The charms of this bleak setting include having to witness the
brutalities meted out by the Israeli military to the crossing motorists.

In one particularly grotesque scene, a sadistic Israeli guard forces people
out of their vehicles, takes their possessions, bullies and abuses them,
then mixes and matches in various vehicles the distraught travelers, all
the while mocking them with an insipid, demeaning song. Ironically, this
episode brings to mind a similar moment in Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, in
which German soldiers force Jewish ghetto residents to dance at a Warsaw
checkpoint.

ES’s outward countenance is paralyzed. Existence has been too overwhelming.
He loves the girl, yet cannot speak. She loves him, yet there are too many
injustices to indulge in love. In an effort to break the impasse, ES
inflates a balloon with a big, grinning imprint of Yasser Arafat. The
bobbing Arafat so disturbs the checkpoint guards, that the lovers can drive
off together unnoticed to Ramallah. The balloon finally settles over the al-
Aksa mosque on the Temple Mount.

After the disappearance of his girlfriend (she never returns to their
checkpoint love-nest), ES and an Israeli citizen have a stare-down in their
respective cars under a billboard advertising a firing range whose target
is the picture of a female, kaffiyeh-shrouded, Palestinian warrior (ES’s
lost love?). A super-stylized fantasy scene ensues at the range when
Israeli shooters start firing at the Palestinian poster-targets. With
pyrotechnic mastery, the fighter-target comes alive and magically downs the
enemy marksmen. The blow-out finale shows a Palestinian flag embedded into
the soil. The film ends with Suleiman and his screen mother watching a
pressure cooker reaching maximum heat. His mother says: “That’s enough now!”

Divine Intervention exhibits a high degree of intelligence and imagination
in constructing a picture of anxiety, tension and rage and then providing
some sense of why it exists. Distinct images are worked out with an unusual
degree of clarity and insight.

The initial disjointed sequences show a relatively privileged Palestinian
social layer engaged in hostile behavior towards one another. This jarring
reality is clarified as the film evolves. During this process, some scenes
are more successful than others, but all moments exhibit a depth of
thought, feeling and humanity. In some ways the focus on this supposedly
privileged layer creates an even more devastating work.

It would perhaps be instructive to take a brief look at the situation
facing the more than one million Palestinians living in Israel.

Countless organizations—international, Palestinian and Israeli human rights
organizations, even the US State Department—have published reports citing
Israel’s consistent human rights violations as defined by the Fourth Geneva
Convention, which the Zionist state itself signed. In April 2002 the United
Nations Human Rights Commission condemned Israel for the mass killing of
Palestinians, citing “gross violations” of humanitarian law and affirmed
the legitimate right of the Palestinian people to resist the Israeli
occupation.

In addition to its overt physical repression, there is the matter of
Israeli economic persecution. In response to the second intifada that
erupted in September 2000, the Zionist regime has taken measures,
particularly through severe travel restrictions, to disrupt Palestinian
life. Unemployment has risen to 65 percent of the population, with some
80,000 Palestinian jobs lost within Israel and another 60,000 in the
Occupied Territories. Nearly half of Palestinian households attempt to
survive on 50 percent of what their income was before the intifada. Direct
and indirect losses for the entire Palestinian economy have been estimated
at between $3.5 and $10 billion, with most of the Israeli-Palestinian
cooperative businesses shut down since September 2000. Average per capita
real income is currently 30 percent below what it was in 1994.

Elias Suleiman’s Divine Intervention digs deeply into the reality behind
these statistics. Does the film have an air of resignation about it,
suggesting that only a miracle can save the Palestinians? No, to show that
things are desperate is not an act of pessimism, merely honest. Any work
that illuminates life in this fashion helps to change the world.

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