Pulpmovies Reviews

How does a filmmaker deal with an issue as politically loaded as the Israeli occupation of the West Bank?

Palestinian born writer-director, Elia Suleiman’s answer is to make a black comedy dealing with the absurdities of the daily existence of a small Arab neighbourhood in Nazareth.

This largely silent film provides a series of surreal vignettes portraying the petty and hilariously repetitive feuds amongst the neighbours – the elderly man who lives to defend his roof and the hole in the road, the man who uses his neighbour’s garden as a rubbish tip and then complains when she throws his rubbish back, the man who waits for a bus that isn’t going to come.

Eventually, something like a plot drifts along, focussing on E.S. (Elia Suleiman), who divides his time between visiting his hospitalised and cantankerous welder of a father, selecting and arranging the copious post-it notes – each containing a scene for a screenplay he’d like to write – and meeting his unnamed girlfriend with whom he never actually speaks.

E.S. and The Woman live on opposite sides of the restricted border between Jerusalem and Ramallah and, as such, their relationship is conducted in the car park behind the Al-Ram checkpoint – silently holding hands as they watch the paranoid and often bizarre antics of the Israeli checkpoint guards.

Always the observer, E.S. acts as a witness for the events for the events that unfold around him – interspersing the brutal reality with episodes of comic fantasy. When he does take action, his short-term gain is countered by permanent loss and a further withdrawal into liberationist fantasy and passive aggression, climaxing with a superbly Palestinian take on the chop-socky genre of Chinese ghost stories.

Divine Intervention describes a community whose numbness to the petty cruelties inflicted on them has blinded them to the abnormality of their situation and left them dealing with each other with the same lack of basic humanity. Petty feuds are rehearsed repeatedly, without even an attempt at resolution, as their society slides further and further into chaos.

Whatever your politics, “Divine Intervention” is a film that is both thoughtful and funny and one that recognises not only the anger and frustrations of the Israeli Arabs, but also their impotence.

Feed on comments to this Post