Palestinian director Elia Suleiman's new film, Divine Intervention, is a series of vignettes laced with absurdity and surrealism. The film is racking up awards at international festivals (including a jury award at Cannes), and Suleiman is using his growing celebrity to claim that the movie is more documentary than comedic drama. If his characterization is accurate, the implications are devastating.
The movie consists of three sections, with scenes from each interspersed. If anything can be said to hold the film together, it is a consistent characterization of Palestinian society as willfully adopting self-destruction as an outlet for its anger. This unflattering portrait is clear in both the characters and plots of all three parts.
Most central is the story of E.S., played by Suleiman, who is simultaneously attending to his ailing father in a hospital and carrying on an impossible romantic relationship. E.S. lives in Ramallah but is involved with a Palestinian woman living in Jerusalem. Because of restrictions on crossing the Green Line -- the border between Israel proper and the territories occupied since the 1967 war -- the only way they can spend time together is to meet in an empty parking lot adjacent to an Israeli military checkpoint. And so we repeatedly join them as they sit in a car, silently holding hands from morning until night. Interspersed are scenes in a Ramallah neighborhood, where neighbors treat one another with naked contempt and hostility, and a series of surreal moments wherein the Israeli occupation is comically stymied.
In many ways the surreal scenes are the film's best, providing empathic insight into the dreams of a people under occupation. When a peach pit, thrown out the window of a moving car, destroys an Israeli tank or a balloon bearing Yasir Arafat's face floats through an Israeli checkpoint and over Jerusalem, Suleiman's film achieves a comic release. Even in the movie's hallmark sequence -- a young Palestinian woman, dressed as a shahid, fending off an attack by five Israeli commandos and their drill instructor -- there is humor underlying the violence. But there is also a clear message: The sequence is full of both Christian iconography (at one point action freezes, with the bullets surrounding the woman's head clearly forming a crown of thorns) and political propaganda (she fends off some of the bullets with a shield shaped like a map of Palestine running from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and her destruction of an Israeli helicopter causes the ground below to transform into a huge Palestinian flag).
But some of these surreal scenes are deeply troubling. For example, Divine Intervention opens in Nazareth, with a gang of adolescent boys chasing a man dressed as Santa Claus up a rocky hill. The basket of gifts Santa is toting breaks, and he leaves a trail of presents in his wake. There is a brief moment where one of the boys pauses, glances at one of the presents lying on the ground, but does not reach for it. Instead, he joins the others in continued pursuit. When they catch Santa, outside an abandoned home, viewers are stunned to see a butcher's knife embedded in Santa's chest. It is hard to watch this without noting the oddity of the boys ignoring the gifts; even as Santa collapses, they show no interest in the presents still in his basket. What is the point of the chase, if it is neither to attack nor to steal?
This is one aspect of the larger question the entire movie begs. In the Ramallah scenes, which dominate the first part of the movie, one resident throws bottles at the police and destroys a neighboring boy's soccer ball; in return, the boy's father beats the man. And yet when a new soccer ball lands on his roof, the resident does not think twice before slashing it apart. Characters continually insult, disrespect and seek to harm one another. Another resident throws his trash into a next-door garden but reacts with shock when his neighbor gets fed up and throws his trash back. He tries to negotiate with her, albeit circularly, but she simply stares sullenly back with her arms crossed in front of her. (This seems to be an analog for the Israeli-Palestinian situation, but, while it presents neither party in a flattering light, it is a Palestinian woman who chooses dogmatism over dialogue.) After Israeli workers come to fix a pothole in the road, a resident promptly uses a shovel to break the fresh pavement, restoring the hole. Shortly thereafter, a neighbor's car gets stuck in it.
The self-defeating posture of these scenes is epitomized in a hospital sequence where the patients disconnect their heart monitors so that they can roam the halls, silently smoking, with their intravenous drips connected. As we follow one patient down the hall, we see that everyone -- doctors and nurses included -- is in the hallway smoking. The tenor of the scene is not unlike that of the Santa Claus sequence: Gifts and opportunities are taken for granted in a single-minded pursuit that can only be described as nihilistic.
There are a couple of scenes in which Israelis explicitly oppress, harass and embarrass Palestinians. One memorable sequence involves an Israeli officer, who may or may not be drunk, forcing motorists at a checkpoint to join him in singing a folksong about the strength of the Jewish people. Another involves an Israeli policeman responding to a French tourist's request for assistance by fetching a blindfolded Palestinian prisoner from the back of a paddy wagon to help direct her to Jerusalem's old city. For the most part, though, the film depicts a Palestinian society choosing to react to adversity with self-destruction. Every interaction, every decision, every act in the film is colored by the reality of Israeli occupation; the harshness of the occupation does not, however, explain the nihilism that underlies every aspect of the film.
Even in the most personal of relationships -- between, say, E.S. and his lover -- there is nothing beyond silence. Not once in the entire movie do we see them exchange a word, a kiss, anything more than a wan smile. The occupation has rendered them mute, as well as powerless. And so they sit -- while in Ramallah neighbors abuse one another and the sick hasten their deaths by chain smoking -- staring at the Israeli checkpoint.
In interviews, Suleiman, who is an Israeli citizen, says he is a supporter of peace, transformed by the occupation but still hopeful. Yet the vision he presents in this film is one where only violence speaks in a compelling voice, where destruction is presented as the only celebratory human interaction. That Palestinians are enraged with the state of things is understandable, but without coherent expression, those feelings cannot be engaged, and the conditions that promulgate them will not be altered. It is exactly this gaping silence in Palestinian society that magnifies the voices of political radicals and fundamentalist clerics. That is the kind of divine intervention we all need less of.
Divine Intervention is distributed by Pyramide Films. It has been screened at the Chicago International Film Festival and the New York Film Festival.
Jeff Mandell is a student at the University of Chicago Law School.
