SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL: With May in the Summer, writer/director/actress Cherien Dabis continues to trace the axis of American/Middle Eastern relations with a warm, light fingertip. The follow-up to her breakout success Amreeka, which premiered at Sundance in 2009, May in the Summer is less politically oriented but equally interested in examining broad social and cultural divides through a tightly focused, domestic lens.
the film’s best moments play out on the periphery of the central conflict
Influenced by genre and autobiographical concerns, when it’s working the story, about a Palestinian-American bride-to-be’s difficult return to her family in Jordan to prepare for her wedding, has a candor and complexity that feels fresh and necessary. More often the plot’s threadbare patches and emotional gaps become conspicuous, messing with the film’s overall impact.
Dabis plays May, a writer born to her Palestinian mother Nadine (Hiam Abbass) and American diplomat father (Bill Pullman). Her parents, divorced for almost a decade, both live in Amman, while May and her younger sisters (played by the achingly wry Alia Shawkat and Nadine Malouf) live in the United States. Nadine, a born again Christian of the bumper sticker variety, disapproves of May’s fiancé because he is a Muslim, or so we are first led to believe. Also a Palestinian and living with May in New York City, where he works as an Ivy League professor, for most of the film this fiancé is merely a voice on the telephone; his absence only adds to Nadine’s extreme prejudice. It’s an interesting turnabout in concept—an evangelical Arab dismissing one of Islam’s intellectual elite—but one Dabis doesn’t develop to satisfying effect.
Instead the film’s best moments play out on the periphery of the central conflict. Dabis has a light touch in shading in some potentially heavy context. When her sisters, shooting questions at May during the initial ride home from the Amman airport, ask what this fancy fiancé teaches, she informs them that it’s a course called 'Contemporary Islamic Civilisation". 'Important," Malouf, not the brightest bulb on the tree, nods thoughtfully.
It’s a subtly ironic moment, more comical for being thrown away. It’s also characteristic of the window Dabis opens onto a rarely seen breed of cosmopolitan Arab-American. Seemingly free of the ideological burdens built into their genes, the girls’ time in Jordan feels little different from the exasperations of any visit home, except when they are fighting over whose Arabic is worse, or taking note of the landmines just past the breakers as they float in the Dead Sea.
Nadine, with her rank superstitions and Handel ring tone, is oppressively opaque for much of the film; the late revelation of her well-secured romantic secret isn’t quite enough to fill her out. Dabis, a warm and sympathetic actress, carries off respective confrontations with her absent, inadequate father (now remarried to a young Indian woman, memorably played by Ritu Singh Pande), and her brittle, begrudging mother with stirring conviction. Moments of lyricism feel as deftly executed, more so for their integration into a general tone of romantic/domestic comedy, complete with golden lighting and an equally buoyant score.
It’s when May moons or broods or otherwise opines with regard to her fiancé that the pretense holding up May in the Summer gets wobbly. 'He makes the best egg white frittata ever," May gushes to her sister, making her best argument for going through with the wedding. That we don’t understand what has spooked her in the first place nags at every moment in this otherwise highly watchable film. Perhaps it was an effort to make May more relatable—putting a conventional dilemma to her unconventional heroine. As the better part of her third film suggests, Dabis is capable of showing us more of the modern Arab-American woman than the clichéd rigors of Hollywood allow.
