|
 |
|
|
| Wednesday, November 09, 2005 |
Suicide bombing, a practical affair
The War Within: 3 stars
Paradise Now: 4 stars (Playing at the Landmark Midtown Art Cinema, showtimes)
Earlier this year, there was a film about a suicide bomber. It was called The War Within, and it wasn't half bad. It was only half good largely because it tried too hard to be fair, to tip-toe down the line of political sensitivity a bit too much. It depicted a Pakistani who, having endured a torturous (literally) incarceration, is smuggled into the United States so he might blow himself to smithereens at Grand Central Station.
It's certainly worth seeing, assuming you can find somewhere to see it. The bomber Hassan shows up at the New Jersey home of his friend Sayeed, who having no idea of Hassan's intentions welcomes him to stay. Tensions build as Hassan's views slip out and he begins to doubt his mission, wondering if he might be better off just living the happy life of an American family man -- or something like that.
As I said, it's worth viewing. But it wasn't great.
Paradise Now is better, also about suicide bombers, and set in Israel instead of the other capital of world Jewry. It's been bopping around the festival circuit, but it lands in Atlanta's Landmark Midtown Art Cinema, and even more than The War Within it's worth a viewing.
In this case, the pitfalls of political correctness are done away with. It's not only that the filmmakers (Israeli-born Palestinian director with a crew of Israelis, Palestinians, and Westerners) weren't making a film about Muslims in the United States, but a film about Palestinians in their native region. In this case, they sidestep grandiose political ambition by merely depicting two days in the life of a suicide bombing duo.
The result is something almost banal, and yet utterly fascinating. Rather than dramatize, director Hany Abu-Asad shows the practical side of suicide bombing, reducing the revolutionary figments of our imagination to what they truly are -- just people, almost bureaucratic in their planning and supporting of the bombing. It humanizes the Palestinian terrorists, yes. That is not what makes this film so disturbing, rather it is the dispassionate way it shows a reality bleaker than the dreams of those who stay just far enough from the fray to spew their rhetoric.
In the character of Suha, the film makes its most overt reach for political comment. A Palestinian, but born in France and raised in Morocco, she becomes the love interest of one of the bombers. She objects to the suicide terrorism of her people, practically and theologically. It's a wrinkle, but it doesn't detract from the overpowering focus of the film on the banal realities. Hannah Arendt would be proud.
|
|
|
|
