Paradise Now is thoughtful and elegant
Paradise Now, the new film by Palestinian Hany Abu-Assad, operates in a world where everyday life unfolds in the shadow of tragic conflict. Busy streets become war zones; abandoned buildings become trenches. Resistance is second nature, ingrained in the fabric of what’s considered normal. To call the film “a bold new call for peace,”-as the movie’s tagline offers-sells this compelling story short.
Paradise Now, which played for a packed and receptive crowd at the Hop January 18th, follows Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) as they live out what could be the last 48 hours of their lives. In the impoverished West Bank city of Nablus, the friends hack their livings as car mechanics, idling away their free time smoking hookah and drinking tea on a trash-littered hillside. Their delicates existences, however, are completely upended when the two are recruited for a suicide mission in Tel Aviv and must soon begin preparing for their destructive deaths.
The movie focuses on Nashef’s Said, quiet and reserved, skinny and slouched. Nashef’s eyes are more revealing than his terse lines. His Said seems aware and confused at the same time; we sense he hides profound melancholy. At night, he pays a local video store owner to take his picture against the backdrop of a New England scene, complete with falling leaves and a tall, white church. Said refuses to smile, insisting instead on looking away from the camera, his eyes and shoulders drooping.
Khaled, on the other hand, is excitable and talkative. After work he eats in a small café where politics seems to marinate in the air. The man sitting next to him unloads his opinions on the closemouthed proprietor of the cafe. As Khaled is served, he rebukes the chatty man half-heartedly, not looking for a fight, but only for lively conversation to go along with his meal.
Paradise Now is at its best in these first few scenes depicting life in the West Bank. A place carrying such heavy political and moral baggage suddenly seems normal and mundane, as it surely is for those actually living there. People are eating, shopping, working, walking. They aren’t making the headlines of the world’s newspapers.
Abu-Assad doesn’t feel a particular need to humanize his Palestinian characters, as some critics have suggested. He simply sticks to the road map of his character driven story. We’re given the West Bank on a micro scale, through the very specific, compelling, believable eyes of Said and Khaled. Instead of force-feeding us the West Bank’s other-worldliness, Abu-Assad lets the images unfold softly, conveying a much gentler verisimilitude than the one we see all too often on the evening news; his camera is often stationary or at a distance from the action, creating a sense of privileged voyeurism for the viewer.
But we never forget that these people are at war. The film opens with a grizzly Israeli soldier in full helmet and body armor scrutinizing IDs at a checkpoint. A line of Palestinians walking home duck in unison as a rocket blast erupts in the distance. From Khaled and Said’s perch on the hillside with their hookah, Nablus looks dusty, tired and battered.
Even the most pervasive reminder of the war, the protagonists’ roles as suicide bombers, is realized in an everyday setting. As Said leaves the video store he’s accosted by Jamal, his chubby, bearded friend, wearing a suit and thin glasses. Said and Khaled have been chosen to become martyrs, Jamal relays, as both of them apparently wished. The scraggly friends spend the next day preparing for their missions at a makeshift martyr factory, emerging looking like slick assassins.
Above all else, Paradise Now is a concise film. Abu-Assad handles the issues at hand in a clever, elegant, and, strikingly natural manner. Justifications for violent Palestinian resistance are presented by our two protagonists in conversations with Suha, Said’s love interest. But the ideas roll off their tongues easily and naturally, a conversation between friends. In one scene, Said calmly tells Suha that “the occupation defines the resistance.” She thinks for a second then decides, “this discussion is going nowhere.”
Thankfully, Abu-Assad is more concerned with the role resistance plays in everyday Palestinian life than in presenting a discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict. In Paradise Now the conflict isn’t a debate but a reality. Abu-Assad’s characters live in a world where the ordinary and the day-to-day often intersect the treacherously profound. A walk home is punctuated by rocket bursts. A trip to the video store ends in an offer to become a suicide bomber.
This intersection resonates most when Khaled, AK-47 and martyr-pledge in hand, delivers his scripted raison d’etre and final farewell in front of a video camera and his mission’s organizers. As Khaled launches into a teary, quivering monologue, his spectators pass around pieces of pita bread to snack on. As he finishes, Khaled takes a deep breath and looks up. The camera operator shakes his head, “It didn’t record.” Khaled looks stunned.
“It’s okay, Khaled,” Jamal stammers between mouthfuls of bread. “Now you have a chance to make it better.”
