Cannes. Salt of This Sea.

"Boldly grabbing hold of the central issue at the heart of the Israel-Palestine conflict - namely, whose land it is that is being contended by both sides - Salt of This Sea will certainly make people talk, even while it fails to fully involve them in its artificial drama," writes Deborah Young in the Hollywood Reporter.

"Making her first feature film, Palestinian Annemarie Jacir shows she is a courageous director able to articulate Palestinian pain and longing to return to the land of their ancestors. But the drama of a Brooklyn-born waitress who naively travels to Ramallah and Israeli-occupied Jaffa to live in 'her homeland' is depressingly one-note, a story that never springs to life."

Updated through 5/22.

"The seductive scent of political correctness apparently overwhelmed judgment when Salt of This Sea began looking for coin, not to mention a festival berth," writes Variety's Jay Weissberg. "That the taste of Annemarie Jacir's feature debut should be bitter is completely understandable given the untenable Palestinian situation, but the heavy-handed, excessively didactic script plays like a primer for people only vaguely aware of the issues while overly confirmed in their righteousness."

Writing in Screen Daily, Lee Marshall finds it's "clearly made with passion and fuelled by a keen resentment at the plight of the Palestinian people. And the film has an authentic, colour-saturated sense of place. But this is not enough to turn an overlong travelogue-cum-manifesto with a flat romantic subplot into a convincing drama."

Un Certain Regard.

Update, 5/21: "The politics are plausible, the lead actors charming enough, and it's nice to see Palestine by sunset," writes Richard Corliss for Time. "But in its making, this is an all-too-familiar melodrama."

Update, 5/22: "Screenwriter William Goldman once instructively quipped that the most boring screenplay imaginable would be The Village of the Happy People; drama thrives on conflict and challenge and perishes from complacency and certainty," notes James Rocchi at Cinematical. "I was thinking about that during the Un Certain Regard selection Salt of this Sea, which might as well be called The Woman who was Always Right."

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Coverage of the coverage: Cannes 08.

Last year: Cannes @ 60. And Cannes 06.

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Posted by dwhudson at May 19, 2008 7:49 AM