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CREDITS
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Directed
by Elia Suleiman
Screenplay
by Elia Suleiman
Elia Suleiman .... E.S.
Emma Boltanski .... The french tourist
Amer Daher .... Auni
Jamel Daher .... Jamal
Nayef Fahoum Daher .... E.S.'s Father (as Naeif Daher)
George Ibrahim .... Santa Clause
Manal Khader .... Woman
George Khleifi .... Jerusalem Neighbor
Avi Kleinberger .... Trainer & Tax Collector
Salman Nattor .... Uncle's Freind
Menashe Noy .... Soldier on Checkpoint
Michel Piccoli .... Santa Claus Breathing (voice)
Nazira Suleiman .... Mother
Produced
by
Humbert Balsan .... producer
Avi Kleinberger .... line producer
Joachim Ortmanns .... co-producer
Babette Schröder .... associate producer
Elia Suleiman .... co-producer
Cinematography by Marc-André Batigne
Film Editing by Véronique Lange
Rated
Runtime:
92 min / France:100 min (Cannes Film Festival)
For rating reasons, go to FILMRATINGS.COM,
and MPAA.ORG.
Parents, please refer to PARENTALGUIDE.ORG
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SYNOPSIS
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 DIVINE
INTERVENTION writer-director Elia Suleiman has been compared to
Woody Allen and Charlie Chaplin, presumably because he has Allen's
intelligent, self-deprecating humor and Chaplin's gift for silent
comedy. DIVINE INTERVENTION is not a silent film, but an intensely
quiet comedy about daily life in the West Bank and Israel. Suleiman
provides a series of not-altogether-related vignettes of people
choked with boredom and drained of compassion, such as an angry
mob of adolescents stabbing Santa Claus, or the neighbor who throws
garbage onto the property next door (and complains when its thrown
back), or checkpoint soldiers who sing and dance, and look menacing
doing so. Though there is no distinct protagonist in this atypical
satire, the filmmaker plays himself returning to Nazareth to help
his ailing, hospitalized father (Nayef Fahoum Daher). Between visits
to the hospital, where patients chain smoke in the halls outside
their rooms, Suleiman falls for a West Bank woman (Manal Khader).
Restrictions force them to carry out their relationship with only
some hand-holding in the parking lot of the Israeli checkpoint between
their two cities.
DIVINE
INTERVENTION favors extended, slow-paced scenes that seem suspended
in time until they are punctuated with supercharged Arabian dance
music like Madonna producer Mirwais Ahmadazi's "Definitive
Beat" or Natacha Atlas's unbelievable cover version of Screamin'
Jay Hawkins's "I Put A Spell On You." Though the characters
often seem too distracted by anxiety and anguish to really connect
with one another, Suleiman's sense of humor giddily overrides all
the darker messages here, as in the climactic sequence--reminiscent
of Monty Python--in which armed men in choreographed unison shoot
at a target outlined in the figure of a veiled woman and she refuses
to capitulate.
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Review
by
DARREL MANSON
Pastor,
Artesia Christian Church, Artesia, CA
http://netministries.org/see/churches/ch01198
Darrel
has an incredible love and interest in the cinematic arts. His reviews
usually include independent and significantly important film.
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 Life
must be full of frustrations for both Israelis and Palestinians. There
is so much violence. The peace process inches forward a bit, then
backs up. Even those of us far away seem to feel the situation is
hopeless and futile. How much more it must be for those living it.
My favorite scene in Divine Intervention is the final one in which
writer/director/actor Elia Suleiman sits with his mother as they watch
a pressure cooker venting steam. There could be no better analogy
for this film. Through humor, satire, absurdity and fantasy, the Palestinian
film maker looks at Palestinian life in Israel and the Occupied Territories.
 Much
of the film is long periods of silence as we watch people doing things
that seem odd -- carrying bottle up to a roof top and lining them
up, throwing a bag of trash into a neighbor's yard, a group of men
chasing Santa Claus up a hill and stabbing him. We finally find out
why some of these things happened, but not always. Because the film
spends so much times showing these scenes and often goes fairly long
periods without any dialogue, the film may strike western audiences
as slow. However, I think we should understand that as just one more
way that Suleiman tells us what Palestinian life is like -- long periods
with strange things happening and not much progress being made.
Another favorite scene is as E.S. (Suleiman's character and alter
ego) sits at a stop light and begins to stare at the Jewish driver
in the car next to him. As they keep staring at each other, the light
changes, but they just keep staring while the cars lined up behind
them honk. What a non-threatening way to say that Israelis and Palestinians
are both at fault for the impasses that mark the detours along the
road to peace.
 Divine
Intervention is filled with such vignettes -- two lovers who clandestinely
meet in a parking lot to hold hands (and they hold hands very well),
patients in the hospital walking up and down the halls with their
IVs while they smoke, a balloon with Yassar Arafat's picture floating
around the holy places in Jerusalem.
 Some
of the vignettes express the pent up feelings of violence that Palestinians
may well feel (E.S. eats an apricot while driving and tosses the pit
out the window, hitting a tank, which then explodes.) Some speak to
the way Israelis and Palestinians treat each other as bad neighbors.
Some leave us scratching our heads with no idea what they are saying,
but give us a feeling of the absurdity of the Israel/Palestine situation.
As the movie ends, the pressure cooker is still boiling away. With
all the pressure that has built up in the mideast, I hope that there
are more vents such as Divine Intervention to provide relief without
explosion. |
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