PALESTINIAN FILM FESTIVAL: Living in a sleepy Palestinian town, college dropout Jawdat is preoccupied by the usual post-adolescent concerns: meeting girls, chasing girls, and sexting and chatting with girls on his cell phone—some of whom happen to live in the West Bank. A slacker, sleepwalking through a job at his cousin’s factory, he’s mostly unmoved by the political conscience of his father Salem, enraged by the discrimination accorded Palestinians with Israeli citizenship.
And then a local telecommunications company erects a cell-phone tower adjacent to Salem's olive grove. For Jawdat, it’s a blessing, broadening his pool of potential conquests. His father, however, sees in the construction something else: a Zionist plot, aimed at erasing the Arab population in the long term (the villagers, he argues, will develop cancer from its radiation), and in the short term, destroying his harvest. He sets fire to the tower, but within days the phone company has rebuilt it. Only a full-scale popular uprising, he declares, can right this wrong.
Meanwhile, Jawdat’s life has become rather more complex. In short order, he fails his Hebrew exam (his school is non-Arab-speaking), loses his girlfriend, falls for another girl—the sister of a none-too-friendly policeman—and is interrogated by cops, who've been monitoring this young Muslim’s calls into the Occupied Territories . . .
As that synopsis would suggest, there’s a lot of meat—at least potentially—on these bones: questions of ethnic and generational rivalry; the border-busting growth of social media; the notion of a citizenry alienated from its own land. But writer-director Sameh Zoabi takes care to keep the tone lightly comic, determinedly inoffensive. Whatever one’s personal views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—or even the role of Facebook—they’re unlikely to be challenged here.
Which would be fine, were its social observations more penetrating, or its satire more acute. But the film is neither funny enough nor sharp enough. Much like its protagonist, it ambles along agreeably—careful, at just 78 minutes, not to outstay its welcome—and then ends, leaving almost no impression whatsoever besides a vague sense of time agreeably spent.
Some might claim that, as such, it embodies a dilemma particular to Middle Eastern filmmakers: how to represent normalcy in such a heightened environment? One has the right, after all, to be trivial—there, no less than anywhere else. But I suspect the problem lies less in the concept than its execution. In deploying the visible signs of Occupation, and using them so half-heartedly, you sense the filmmaker trying to have his halawa and eat it too; it’s all the more depressing, therefore, that he lacks the courage of his convictions. Better a straight-out romcom, or a strident piece of agit-prop, than something that flirts with seriousness, only to then deflect any attempt at ascribing a deeper meaning.
Of course, there remains another possibility: that this divided and unresolved structure, warring against itself, is itself a metaphor for the contemporary Palestinian condition. I’m by no means convinced. Still, weaker cases have been made.
It ambles along agreeably [...] and then ends, leaving almost no impression whatsoever besides a vague sense of time agreeably spent.
