Thwarted Young Man
PARADISE NOW
Directed by Hany Abu-Assad
PRIME
Directed by Ben Younger
Hanif Kureishi's My Son the Fanatic was conspicuously forgotten by the British press following London's 7/7 terrorist bombings. The film's story, about an Asian immigrant who loses his British-born son to the atavistic appeal of Islamic extremism, either failed to dent public consciousness (more proof that contemporary movies aren't taken seriously), or the mainstream media simply prefers hysterical speculation to achieving a complex understanding of what makes a person in our midsts go from humanism to terrorism. Paradise Now attempts to examine that grievous riddle.
Paradise Now contemplates a young Palestinian man's decision to become a suicide bomber. Said (Kais Nashef) agrees to surrender his own life by slipping past border guards in Neblus and becoming a human missile in Tel Aviv. He intends his individual strike to attack the Israeli occupation and speak to the world. Through emotional richness, Paradise Now shows that the effect of Said's self-annihilation cuts two ways; it will have personal as well as politial consequences. As with My Son the Fanatic, viewers are left to decide which aspect of this tragedy moves them most.
To convey the enormity of the suicide bomber problem, director Hany Abu-Assad intensifies a subject from the headlines. With Dutch co-writer Bero Beyer, Abu-Assad constructs a suspense story that also documents the social and private issues that lead suicide bombers to their actions. Said, introduced working in an auto garage with his best friend Khaled (Ali Suliman), argues with their boss about the world being straight or crooked. Khaled affects an immediate, fed-up solution (on a metaphorical car bumper) but the film shows that the more quiet and reflective Said will soon outdo him.
Certainly Paradise Now critiques quasi-religious guerrilla tactics (the title derives from Khaled's protest, "I'd rather have paradise in my head than live in this hell"-a rote defense learned from clearly manipulative radicals who promise him a heavenly reward), but the film is also sympathetic to the young men's dilemma. They yearn to feel part of the revolution, plus Said bears the burden of his father being shot as a collaborator. Said and Khaled represent a more serious version of the confusion heard in some rap records where politically naïve MCs are caught up in a vague form of political refusal yet are unable to think past their private aggravation.
Call it a global effect of imperialism. Still, Abu-Assad approaches the problem with an unexpected Western romanticism. This Palestinian, Dutch, German and French co-production seeks a cross-cultural, inarguable humanism, implying that it's useless to simply demonize misguided "freedom fighters" when you can explicate (perhaps learn from) their bewilderment. Paradise Now turns the news into archetypes. Abu-Assad balances the pressures faced by youth like Said and Khaled with the political middle ground and pacifism represented by the female characters Suha (Lubna Azabal, the amazingly mercurial actress from Andre Techine's Loin), as the young woman attracted to Said, and Said's fearful mother (Hiam Abbass). The male characters personify unexamined aggression.
When Suha questions Said about his participation in a recent attack on a movie theater ("What did the cinema do to you?"), it is a clue to the film's political and aesthetic sophistication. Said counters: "Is there a genre as boring as life?" (meaning a movie form that acknowledges the stasis he feels). And Suha responds "Your life is like a minimalist Japanese film." These cinematic abstractions reject standard bland realism for a stylized emotional representation. That's why Abu-Assad evokes the poetic political quandary in Elie Suleiman's Divine Intervention while making both Said and Khaled resemble the political naifs in Bertolucci's Before the Revolution. In all, he appeals to universal cinematic understanding: the political in the personal.
It's clear that Said's potential is as wild as the beard that sprouts down his neck covering his Adam's apple. He's a picture of thwarted masculine vitality. With his curly hair and light-brown eyes, he's also a mysterious figure of banked sensuality and frustrated intelligence. His willing sacrifice is the film's conundrum; he is the singular example of a problem the West dares not look at closely. Said poses for a memorial photograph that makes Suha wonder why he looks angry. "You should see me when I'm mad," he says-a warning and a puzzlement. Abu-Assad's film probes the difference.
To wit: Both Said and Khaled share a brotherly bound and affection but they're also competitive. The depth of their camaraderie-and their common travails as tyrannized youth-becomes evident when the two young men prepare for their suicide bomber mission. After ritual indoctrination, bathing and haircut, their likeness is striking. They're simplified to an ethnic essence; their shorn heads and black suits inadvertantly make them look like "settlers"-a cosmic joke on the Middle East's racial ambiguity. It's also surprisingly homoerotic, but in the widest application of the term. "Our bodies are all we have to fight with against the never ending occupation," Said says.
As Said and Khaled willingly change from boys to automatons, they seem doubly tyrannized-by both their Israeli oppressors and their own Palestinian organizers. And this irony is made devastating in the scene where they record farewell video tapes. The bonds of friendship and politics are strong and tragic as in DeSica's post-WWII boyhood paradigm Shoeshine. This twin resemblance is a visual coup; the suicide-bomber dilemma, the choice between protest and terrorism, reverberates through the men's physical similarity and their emotional contrast. It's important to realize that Paradise Now does not rationalize suicide bombers, but by coolly showing how Said and Khaled submit and acquiesce to necessary political resistance, something more difficult and troubling is revelead: Abu-Assad illustrates how family and tradition get locked into the martyrdom. This film has a sorrowful subtext we must always keep in mind: The Fanatic, My Brother.
Up to the point that Prime features a nostalgic reminiscence by its 23-year-old protagonist David Bloomberg (Bryan Greenberg) wistfully remembering his romance with a 37-year-old divorcee (Uma Thurman), it seems an appealingly unabashed portrait of the New York Jewish Prince, the best-ever evocation of the young Philip Roth. And yet, a certain ethnic specificity is missing. Writer-director Ben Younger doesn't go deep enough into his complaint, but he's achieved an entertaining, unscathed, modern version of that old neurosis: Momism.
Meryl Streep portrays David's mother-a therapist whose patient, Rafi (Thurman), turns out to be David's new lover. This makes Prime a Freudian field day. Unfortunately, Younger fails to fully examine the precepts of identity that keep his mother opposed to his cross-cultural romance and to which he, perhaps unconsciously, subscribes. That means the film ultimately is no deeper than a Woody Allen caprice like the "Oedipus Wrecks" episode of New York Stories. The only exception is that Younger is easier on himself, and dishonest with the audience. Still, it's a better catch than The Squid and the Whale.