Director : Hany Abu-Assad
Producer : Bero Beyer
Screenwriter : Hany Abu-Assad, Bero Beyer
Starring : Kais Nashif, Ali Suliman, Lubna Azabal, Amer Hlehel, Hiam Abbass, Ashraf Barhoum
Writer-director Hany Abu-Assad's social realist tract Paradise Now, which he
co-wrote with Bero Beyer, gives us a blueprint of lives and circumstances that
entwine and eventuate in a suicide-bombing mission in modern-day Palestine.
It's a thoughtful rumination on the dead-end cycle of violence that ruts an
entire society in poverty and endless mourning.
Said (Kais Nashif) may be strikingly handsome with his scraggly curls and
piercing eyes, but consider his dead-eyed gaze for a moment and you realize
he's living on a whole different planet. Since his boyhood, Said has both
begrudged and sought to distance himself from the legacy of his father, found
to be a collaborator with the Israelis and, hence, executed. Said's close
friend, Khaled (Ali Suliman), likewise nurses a deep-rooted shame for his
father, who he once witnessed capitulating with Israeli soldiers. Said and
Khaled have since formed a pact to give their lives together to the Palestinian
cause, and go out in a redeeming blaze of glory.
The two are the political and temperamental opposite of Suha (Lubna Azabal) --
the pretty, Western-educated daughter of a "martyred" leader whom Said deeply
admires. While she cannot accept the rationale behind her father's death nor
the eye-for-an-eye violence that has blinded her homeland, she is strongly
attracted to the sullen, charmingly simple Said. Meanwhile, Said's mother (Hiam
Abbass), as strong-willed as she is, can only watch as her son drifts closer to
the violent fate that she fears awaits him. That fated moment arrives with
Jamal (Amer Hlehel), an operative for a terrorist outfit, who informs Said and
Khaled that they've been chosen for a suicide-bombing mission set for the
following day.
With bombs strapped beneath their dark, dapper suits, Said and Khaled attempt
to cross the Israeli border, but gunfire forces them to turn back. On orders of
his superiors, Khaled aborts the mission. Said, however, decides to give it
another shot. He, thereby, sends the whole organization, paranoid of discovery,
into a tailspin. The remainder of Paradise Now is little more than a chase
picture as Khaled, accompanied by the bewildered Suha, tries to track down
Said, while Said shunts from Tel Aviv and back to the West Bank, rankled by a
briefly awakened conscience. Abu-Assad doesn't end his morality tale there, but
takes it up one more notch, as Said--intent on exorcising himself of his
father's ghost -- attempts the mission one more time as Khaled, desperate to
pull his friend back from the brink, tags after him.
Paradise Now, Abu-Assad sets a high bar for himself, trying to tell an
emotionally and philosophically complex story with minimalist exposition and
style. The pace is steady, matter-of-fact, driving forward just as surely and
inexorably as its characters tempt the existential void. Together with
cinematographer Antoine Heberlé and editor Sander Vos, Abu-Assad gives us a
visually arresting palate of the West Bank, with its sun-baked ruins and
streets thrumming with life. The director, however, mistakes monotony for
subtlety. Aside from a few scenes of well-timed deadpan humor, his tone and
pacing are both so flat that his movie eventually feels listless. And, in its
final third, where the script should've upped the emotional ante, it only plods
towards an anti-climax, never deepening our understanding of its characters
nor, in Said's case, really vitalizing his humanity. Indeed, Beyer and
Abu-Assad's characters are never more than labels, standing in for one moral
attitude or another towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Failing to
humanize its characters beyond that, our engagement with them is
proportionately limited.
Like many humanist portraits, Paradise Now is heavily dependent on a
filmmaker's knack for plumbing deep into his characters' psyches for inner,
more universal conflicts, beneath their political ones. And the job of
depicting characters within this culture, in particular, owing to its more
reserved mores (compared to Western cultures), demands an artist with the
keenest emotional antennae. While Paradise Now is a technically assured
treatment of an important story, it never transcends its political posturing
and finds the humanity as profoundly as it means to.
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Rating: PG-13, 2005