In the Middle East, where there's rarely consensus about anything, one thing is certain. In this land of crooked men walking crooked miles, the shortest distance between two points is almost never a straight line.
More specifically, straight lines, much like safety and logic, don't often seem to exist. And in that disputed sliver of land claimed by both Arabs and Israelis, madness has assumed its own awful logic for such a long, hard time that the locals now appear unable or unwilling to recognize sanity even when it does briefly wriggle its way into their lives.
Consider the opening of the Palestinian film Paradise Now. A man walks into an auto shop in the West Bank city of Nablus, complaining that his recently repaired bumper is still not straight. The mechanic makes a cursory measurement and declares the bumper OK. When the customer argues that even a blind man could see it's bent, the mechanic re-measures, this time claiming that the ground itself is crooked. Since both ground and bumper are equally crooked, the Palestinian mechanic argues, they must both actually be even.
It's a pretty spot-on analogy for a regional conflict where even the foundations are skewed, and where popular wisdom maintains that two wrongs inevitably make a right. So when the customer in Paradise Now continues to complain, the young mechanic simply picks up a sledgehammer and proceeds to smash the man's bumper to bits. Factor in a coffee pot frantically boiling over in the foreground and you've got more juicy political metaphors than anyone might reasonably expect to be stuffed into a barely five-minute scene.
Unfortunately, it's mostly downhill from there.
Directed by a Palestinian filmmaker, Hany Abu-Asad, and financed largely by European companies, Paradise Now is a sporadically fascinating but (despite what the spin doctors would have us believe) far from objective look at a very thorny topic. Walking a very fine line between humanist art-cinema and Palestinian agit-prop, the movie is already controversial — and marketable — for daring to present what is essentially a sympathetic look at suicide bombers.
Regrettably, the film's effort to supply its suicide bombers with a human face hinges to an alarming degree on dehumanizing the intended victims.
The wannabe terrorists of Paradise Now are Said (Kais Nashef), the cranky mechanic of the opening scene, and his pal Khaled (Ali Suliman) — two young men who have their reasons. These are people we can relate to, who love their mothers, have girlfriends, quirks and aspirations, and who just happen to be angry or disaffected enough to have been recruited for a "martyrdom mission" to kill as many innocent Israelis as possible. Never mind about the potential victims being innocent; the movie flits right over that little detail, so you're likely to miss it too.
With a minimum of fuss and a coolly observant eye, the film shows us Said and Khaled spending what they expect to be their last night on earth, going through the motions of blissful normalcy, eating with their families, playing with siblings. Paradise Now segues deftly from intimate, understated drama to deadpan humor to horror as it documents the mission coming together, here observing a bumbling attempt at recording a farewell video, there silently fetishizing the nuances of the preparation process. The shaving off of a beard (the better to go undetected in the midst of non-Muslim targets), the construction and meticulous application of the explosive belt — these are the details that transform a body into a weapon of mass destruction.
Paradise Now bears a superficial resemblance to the thriller genre, but it isn't particularly interested in passing itself off as a thriller (nor is it particularly satisfying when looked at that way). What we get instead is a relentless drumbeat of human desperation, capped by an angsty image of a would-be bomber standing in front of a mirror regarding the grotesque device strapped to his torso. Think of it as a we-have-met-the-alien-and-he-is-us moment simultaneously channeling Travis Bickle, Camus' Stranger and Jeff Goldblum in The Fly.
But then there are the speeches. While it's true that a few of the movie's characters express a token doubt or two about the validity of walking into a pizza parlor and exploding rusty nails through the soft skulls of toddlers, Paradise Now is no even-handed plea for sanity. In some sense, it is simply a new and more sophisticated sort of propaganda film (designed primarily for Western audiences), where calmly delivered rationales for murder are so carefully folded into the body of the narrative that they do their dirty work on an almost subliminal level.
In a series of litanies delivered at key moments, Israelis are routinely reduced to faceless, sadistic monsters just looking for an excuse to continue oppressing blameless Palestinians (this argument is advanced several times, once by a human rights worker). The fact that these speeches are placed in the mouths of sensible, sympathetic characters — and not some wild-eyed Team America terrorists shrieking "Muhammad-Muhammad-Jihad-Jihad!" while drooling over the dangled carrot of 72 virgins — makes the slippery slope of the film's morality all the more insidious.
The movie's target audience is likely to consist largely of those predisposed to its point of view, but politics aside, there's a whole other slice of the demographic pie primed for Paradise Now. Whether consciously or not, the film taps into a growing public appetite for movies about suicide bombers (I saw no less than four at the recent Toronto Film Festival, and more are on the way), which is not all that dissimilar to the public appetite for movies about serial killers.
Of course, watching a film that purports to offer an even-handed view of self-exploding jihadists is a lot more respectable than watching Hannibal Lecter chow down on human livers, but it still comes down to that same seedy fascination with the glamour of the pathological.
Paradise Now has more serious things on its mind than appealing to our baser instincts, but any way you look at it this is a movie that's skating on thin ice.
This article appears in Nov 23-29, 2005.
