The first third of 'Divine Intervention' is a portrait of
a crowded community in Nazareth: neighbours feud bitterly over property
boundaries and parking spaces; and a young man waits all day at a bus-stop
even though he knows the buses are no longer running. All these are thinly
veiled allegories of Palestinian life under the Israeli Occupation, where
territory and borders are an unending point of contention, and where ordinary
services are suspended indefinitely. Interwoven through these dry, often
bizarre episodes is a simple narrative in which an angry man sees his
workshop forced out of business by the restrictions of Occupation, and
then, after all his assets have been seized, suffers a heart attack and
collapses.
The protagonist of 'Divine Intervention' is filmmaker E.S., played by
alter ego Elia Suleiman, who also wrote and directed the film - and the
man who has collapsed is his father. We first encounter E.S. eating an
apricot as he drives to visit his father in hospital - as E.S. winds down
his window and throws out the fruit's stone, it hits an Israeli tank,
which promptly explodes. This, like so many scenes in the film, is a 'divine
intervention' - a fantasy of resistance, defiance and escape inserted
by the director into his autobiography, in a wishful, but ultimately futile,
attempt to reverse the daily injustices of Occupation through his creative
art.
'Divine Intervention' is a surreal, very dark farce almost entirely devoid
of dialogue - much like the status of Israeli-Palestinian relations. Elia
Suleiman's gentle visual satire and minute social observations are reminiscent
of the films of Jacques Tati ('Monsieur Hulot's Holiday') or Otar Iosseliani
('Monday Morning'), but the political nature of his work makes it more
important, and much more bitter.
Suleiman is also a fine actor, who somehow manages to convey an extraordinary
range of emotions despite maintaining a fixed expression of quiet impassivity
throughout. In particular in the sequences where E.S. sits silently in
the car park of the Al-Ram Checkpoint and holds hands with his Jerusalem
girlfriend (Manal Khader) as they both stare stonily ahead at Israeli
guards humiliating Palestinian drivers, his righteous indignation and
erotic longing combine to create a uniquely nuanced intensity.
A film full of surprises, epiphanies and magic, set in a world where
change is possible only in one's dreams, and where a director can prevent
his father's miserable death only in his film. One of this year's must-sees.
Anton Bitel, 30.03.03
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