Divine Intervention

Confession: After 9/11, it didn’t matter if I ever saw another film from Iran or any Middle Eastern country. Despite directors Moshen Makhmalbaf, Abbas Kiarostami and Youssef Chahine touching my imagination in extraordinary movies that renewed my own humanity—and my appreciation of others’—I felt hurt enough to reject them all forthwith. Maybe you did too—out of a sense of vengeance and self-protection. Life, after all, is more important than art. But a good movie is a sign of life and so are the inflaming, militant emotions expressed in Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention. Even though the aggrieved yet seemingly hopeless suicide bombings in Palestine provoked a variation of my post-9/11 distaste, Divine Intervention demands to be seen. Suleiman’s craft, wit, sense of righteousness and fairness not only seduce the moviegoer in me, they compel my world citizenship.

This must be how nonracist white critics felt about Spike Lee’s 1989 Do the Right Thing—dazed yet assenting to an undeniable display of art and politics that seem just, if unsettling. Divine Intervention has that same feeling of going boldly in the right, if (in the U.S.) unpopular, direction. That’s not to say Suleiman has made an Intifada tract; this movie is a richly varied observation of life in occupied territories. Primarily concerned with the habits of well-off Palestinians (Suleiman makes no apologies for being a filmmaker—essentially a middle-class pursuit), Divine Intervention is sensitive to the conflicts within an oppressed group. Among themselves, struggling with ethnic heritage and plain ol’ difficult socializing, these are people very much like us. They carry an historical burden but are shown without sanctimony. Despite injustice heaped on from the outside, they survive their own complex humanity—class differences, property pride (and envy), the hazards of love and death. ("I am crazy because I love you," says a suitor in times of strife.)

Suleiman makes all of this tumble across the screen as amazingly smooth deadpan comedy. What plot there is coheres through patterns of behavior and recurring faces—life sketches. There are bickering neighbors, a pair of surreptitious lovers, Suleiman himself tending to his father’s illness and an array of personal and public disputes constantly erupting in the Holy Land. I haven’t seen a movie this visually elegant since De Palma’s Femme Fatale or Godard’s In Praise of Love. And Suleiman (plus cinematographer Marc-Andre Batigne) counts on the same art-conscious, politically open audience as do De Palma and Godard; his revelatory compositions carry subtle political import before expanding into outright protest. But by the time Suleiman bares his fist—in a Hong Kong-style action sequence that is simultaneously apocalyptic and funny—he has emphasized a charming community critique of who the Palestinians are nonpolitically. This critique of a social group’s problems—those problems aggravated by being detained, confined, partitioned—suggests an honesty you can almost trust.

Not saying that Divine Intervention offers a suspicion-free experience. Liberal moviegoers have enjoyed the happenstance of seeing their leanings frequently ratified and glorified onscreen—so much so that people rarely question the politics of movies that seem to be saying what they want to hear. (For instance, you could mount a pretty good argument that The Hours demonizes the gayness it sentimentalizes by showing it to be maudlin, sexless, elitist; and Antwone Fisher betrays the social problems it pretends to heal.) But Divine Intervention doesn’t simply appeal to our sensitivity about Palestinian oppression; it also challenges what we think they ought to do about it. Suleiman even dares to imply what they think about us.

In the splendid and confounding opening scene, a man dressed as Santa Claus scurries through sunny woods, chased by rock-throwing boys and losing packages from his backpack as he runs away. The signs are provocative—and glowingly lit by Batigne—but the suggested meanings are unnerving. It seems Western altruism is being rejected. The caricature of American beneficence as a fat piñata-Santa is worthy of Thomas Nast, but while you’re laughing, a series of modern complexities go through your head: Since Santa has become a substitute, nonreligious icon—in fact an emblem of questionable, heedless rapacity, also satirized in the burglar-Santa of Ice Cube’s Friday After Next—Suleiman’s joke can’t be called anti-Christian. Yet, it slices through Yankee sanctimony. (At the same time, the Santa image evokes news footage of Mohammad Salameh on trial for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing—a blind Santa wearing a red cap with a white brim.) Suleiman deals in pop perplexity—stirs up responses—and moves on.

Like Do the Right Thing, Divine Intervention is a catalog of social impressions (subtitled "A Chronicle of Love and Pain") that come out of an oppressed consciousness. Suleiman masters a poetic way of showing the dailiness of Occupation. ("The bus doesn’t stop here anymore," one man tells another who steadily waits.) His scenes of comic discord evoke Jacques Tati and Chaplin in their eerie quiet (and potentially lethal slapstick). This contrasts the Middle East’s violent commonplace, a commentary on "peace"—on mental solitude—in which fantasizing and ruminating are not without consequence or obligation. In film history, such comic bitterness as this (criticizing political strife) usually only gets expressed outside of the oppressive context, when the filmmakers have escaped into exile or freedom (whether Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be or Costa-Gavras’ The Sleeping Car Murders and Z). Here it’s from deep inside, which makes it more mysterious and probably less compromising. The way Do the Right Thing busted out of the urban ghetto is the only parallel I can think of, and our media’s virtual silence on Divine Intervention indicates that Suleiman’s art film is just as controversial. It’s also as impressively agit-pop.

That Ninja warriors sequence has implications that will undoubtedly divide Suleiman’s liberal New York supporters, still it’s a stunning jape that conflates pop fantasies of rebellion and Otherness and reminds us that even popcorn movies can have social/political import and special Third World significance. The landscapes of neighborhood and desert in daytime, and checkpoints at night, against a black sky with lighted areas and colorful cars and trucks slipping by as if melting in slo-mo, somehow recall Dali’s great painting Persistence of Memory. Yasir Arafat’s face scrawled on a balloon floating over disputed territories mixes anxiety, whimsy and prophecy just like that classic ponderable The Red Balloon. Best of all is a car radio broadcast of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ "I Put a Spell on You" that uncannily states Palestinian-Jewish attraction/repulsion—a war of cousins as a Jewish friend calls it—recasting pop as a moral expression. (It’s meant to have the effect of Public Enemy revising the Isley Brothers’ "Fight the Power.") The song’s new Rai arrangement (sung by Natacha Atlas) gives it the modern, rebellious force of pop music rather than the usual folksy bromide. It should introduce both Edward Said and Fouad Ajami to the glorious complexities of pop that clarifies what politicians muddle. Whatever happens in the world tomorrow, Suleiman’s movie—like Spike Lee’s only good one—will live.