New York Dispatch. 6.

Now that the New York Film Festival has come and gone, it's time for a post-mortem - not on the festival itself, for I judge it personally according to a simple standard. If there were more films that I wanted to see than there was time in which to see them, I view a festival positively. That was certainly the case in New York. Also, festivals for general audiences should be topical, and New York was. It's up to the audience to complete or just extend the discussions that films begin.

Beyond that, politics kept coming up, in the opening ode to Edward R Murrow, Good Night and Good Luck, and in a festival panel on "Speaking Truth to Power" that turned into a well-meaning unison chorus singing to the choir on the flaws of the Bush administration (and less on what prevented the press from speaking truth to power). Now there's a discussion I'd like to hear.

There was also the festival program, particularly two films about Israel - Paradise Now, by Hany Abu-Assad and Avenge But One of My Two Eyes by Avi Mograbi.

Paradise Now is the thriller about suicide bombers that has seemed an inevitable subject for a feature. (The War Within, now in theaters, is another.) Two young men designated to take their lives for God and Palestine spend those 48 hours before the moment of truth together in Nablus.

The film is fiction, realistic fiction, and it makes no claim to being a documentary-style work of fiction, or even a universalized picture of terrorists. It's a single story, and we can be thankful for that. It's not didactic.

Thrillers need suspense and uncertainty. There's plenty of suspense once the Nablus auto mechanics Said and Khaled get the call and shed their scruffy look to become suited West Bank yuppies. It's comical how much they look like The Yes Men in the satirical documentary of that name. Even the ritual videotaping has humor.

The hardship of the Israeli occupation is presented as a certainty - you might call it the film's only certainty, since even the bombers have their doubts about paradise, and about suicide. While Abu-Assad and the characters that he places close to our two bombers do not advocate suicide and the murder of civilians, we do see the alarming fact in this work of fiction that a society and economy have grown up around bombings. There's even a market for videotapes of bombers professing faith before leaving on their final missions. (One character does note that the market for videotaped murders of informants is better.) It's murder as a way of life (murder as living?). Abu-Assad has clearly done his research. He said as much at a press conference at the film festival.

It's even more troubling that there's less logic to the militancy of the young men than there is to the hesitation that might make them reconsider doing anything so extreme. These are not characters who have nothing to live for but destruction, but they are characters who can tip either way, depending on the circumstances that arise. Think about it for a second. The unstable person who gravitates toward suicide bombing may also be the unstable person who becomes an informer. Now that's frightening.

The picture is getting more complicated. Palestinian leaders are reporting that, when they met with George W Bush, they were told by Bush that God told him to invade Afghanistan after 9/11. Bush also told them that God told him to liberate Iraq. The implication which I see is that he's saying that one ought to follow God's word. Last time I checked, a lot of people out there were getting direct instructions from God. (Nixon, Bush, take your pick.)

It's also frightening to be reminded that war is fought by young men who lack the power of judgment to see what war will do to them.

Israelis should be just as concerned about Avenge But One of My Two Eyes by the prolific Avi Mograbi, who is such a presence with his microphone and dead-on questions that people have gone for the obvious parallel and called him the Michael Moore of Israel. You could just as easily call him the Nick Broomfield of Israel, if that kind of shorthand is necessary, and it almost always is for my lazy writer colleagues out there. Mograbi is getting to be more and more of a presence on the festival circuit, and that's a good thing. The truth benefits when there's an honest voice telling it, or at least part of it. This film had French support and showed at Cannes this spring.

The title comes from the Bible, in which a blinded Samson asks God to bring revenge against his Philistine enemies. It should come as no surprise that a film with this title is about revenge. The source of the revenge, while not something entirely knew, catches you off guard. Mograbi takes you to a school trip visiting a holy site, the elevated plateau of Masada, where Jews who gathered there committed collective suicide when cornered and outnumbered by Roman forces in 72 AD.

We watch as Masada tour guides prepare high school kids who will soon be of military age for the atmosphere of the last days. Since we know the outcome, two responses from this modern generation are certain. They'll fight to the last man, and they'll demand revenge for those killed. Sounds like a war melodrama, and it is. It also happens to be real, as is the revenge message.

In between scenes of site visits to Masada and frenzied revenge rallies, Mograbi shows everyday scenes of Arabs in the West Bank being blocked from their own land by Israeli barriers or simply being humiliated by young Israeli soldiers. The soldiers are not much older than the students learning the myths of Masada. They are also the same age as the delirious celebrants at kitschy nationalistic rallies. A furious Mograbi harangues the soldiers on camera when he sees them acting illegally - or when they try to keep him from filming. They usually relent. You get the impression that they might react differently if harangued by an Arab.

Are the fanatic nationalists filmed by a bewildered Mograbi too easy a target? Maybe that's not the issue. Of course someone surrounded by a crowd screaming revenge makes a hyperbolic figure, but you have to be concerned when the crowd is screaming the same thing.

Or maybe we should be concerned that nobody's paying attention. Mograbi's film got positive reviews from the critics and opened in theaters in Israel. There was concern among reviewers at Cannes that the "provocative" film (as if a film by Mograbi wouldn't be provocative) might "divide" Jews and Israelis (as if one needed a film to do that). In fact, it had no discernible effect, because it had no discernible public. Mograbi told the crowd at one of his New York screenings that no one in the Israeli general public went to see it.  (More on this subject in an upcoming interview with Avi Mograbi.)

Posted by dwhudson at October 12, 2005 2:08 PM