Thankfully, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But when an art-house film calls itself The Kite, and the first image on screen is a precisely composed shot of a kite floating high above this mortal coil, it's a safe bet that what we see is only a facilitator for what we're supposed to get.
Kites fill the sky in director Randa Chahal Sabbag's The Kite, hoisted by groups of Lebanese children playing in close proximity to a mean old barbed wire fence splitting a Druze Muslim village into a Lebanese side and an Israeli side. Indeed, the very first kite we see is emblazoned with the cedar tree of the Lebanese flag, alerting us to a political dimension underpinning the anything-but-lighter-than-air symbolism, where the titular playthings are nothing less than free-floating signifiers of yearnings for freedom, serenity and the innocence of childhood.
One of the kite-flyers is our young heroine, Lamia (Flavia Bechara), who at 16 isn't really a kid anymore but not quite a woman either. No sooner are we introduced to the girl than the scene shifts to a room full of old men sitting around sipping coffee, fingering their worry beads and deciding her fate, eventually decreeing that Lamia be shipped off to the other side of the border to marry a cousin she's never met. The women all eavesdrop from a safe distance outside the door, this being a sector of the Arab-Muslim world where the sexes coexist in parallel universes as rigidly drawn as the upstairs-downstairs of masters and servants in a Merchant-Ivory film.
There are other worlds here, too, and the junctures where they collide create some memorable friction. The movie gets considerable mileage from the Fellini-esque spectacle of gaggles of large Arab women, completely covered except for their eyes, assembling on opposite sides of the border and peering across the divide with binoculars while shouting small talk at one another through megaphones. The surreal grace note is an Israeli border guard dutifully taking notes on their conversations, combing the gossip for clues to possible terrorist activity.
The Israeli guard is Youseff (Maher Bsaibei) — a Druze, like Lamia — and somewhere in the middle of monitoring the arrangements for the girl's cross-border nuptials, he realizes he's fallen in love with her (and she, through binoculars, with him). Sadly, this is where The Kite begins to lose focus, clearly bursting at the seams to become a Romeo and Juliet story between its Israeli boy and Lebanese girl, but simultaneously casting itself in too many other directions. The film begins drifting through a series of narrative detours the moment Lamia is stuffed into a wedding gown and escorted along the heavily guarded stretch of road separating the family she's leaving and the one she's compelled to join.
The Kite dwells on Lamia's unhappy situation, apparently determined to equate her loss of personal freedom with larger political issues, but the movie too often settles for explaining itself via ham-fisted symbols — frequently framing characters behind fences, gates and barriers (the figurative flip side of all those damned kites) — or through the plaintive lyrics of the Arab chanteuse Nagat, whose sweet-smoky pipes are heard throughout. Major points here for poetic aspirations, but the movie's methodology is so heavy-handed that The Kite never takes flight.
Meanwhile, a world away from where Lamia languishes, we get a very different sort of 16-year-old in Portland skate punk Alex (Gabe Nevins), the central figure of Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park. While Lamia is forced into an arranged marriage and surrounded by checkpoints, Alex is disaffected, disconnected and burdened with more freedom that he knows what to do with.
Paranoid Park is the latest in Van Sant's odes to alienated youth — a life's work that encompasses nearly every important movie the director's made, from Mala Noche and Drugstore Cowboy to My Own Private Idaho and the unofficial triptych of Gerry, Elephant and Last Days. You could probably even lump Good Will Hunting in there as well, although its conventional, linear structure stands in stark contrast to the artful anarchy of a film like Paranoid Park.
Van Sant makes us work to piece together events seriously scrambled owing to our narrator's imperfect articulation skills ("Sorry," says Alex, "I didn't do that well in creative writing"), eloquently capturing the fractured thought process of a young, unsettled mind. The story stutters and slip-slides, repeating fragments of scenes and dialogue with a calculated randomness that seems to put quotidian details of high school life on par with an accidental manslaughter, the traumatic event submerged at the center of the movie.
The director follows the young characters with his customary elegance and attention to detail (Gus clearly loves these kids, treading territory similar to Larry Clark but without the exploitative aftertaste). We get more of the long takes and eerily fluid camerawork that's defined Van Sant's recent films, while cinematographer Christopher Doyle's lush imagery and Nino Rota's even lusher music turn even the grittier aspects into sheer poetry. The effect is all the more sublime for its apparent casualness.
Much of the casting for Paranoid Park was reportedly done on MySpace, which makes perfect sense as you watch Van Sant's beautiful zombies unwittingly evoke the divinely wooden non-actors of a Bresson film, empty vessels waiting to be filled with something, anything — maybe even grace, if they're lucky enough to break on through to the other side. For Gus' kids, so overwhelmed by life they can't even recognize their own feelings, buffer zones have nothing to do with barbed wire and border guards.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 1, 2008.
