JEWISH INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL: Although it never says so outright, Yolande Zauberman’s suggestively titled exercise in provocation does seem to think that the path to global peace is best laid horizontally. Through its grainy video footage and its muffled (occasionally inaudible) audio, an interesting study in shifting perspectives emerges from a work that, to its credit, rarely stoops to the giggly depths its moniker suggests.
Would You Have Sex With an Arab? is simple in its structure. The filmmaker corners nightclubbers, late night pedestrians and denizens of bars and cafes, mostly in the wee hours of a Tel Aviv night, and puts the question to them without warning. Responses are varied in passion but, initially, generally in the negative. Most say that a coupling would be too hurtful to family members should they ever become aware of it, or that the idea is too loaded with socio-political baggage to overcome; traditional hardliners find it simply inconceivable. The conversations consider other ethnicities and religious beliefs, such as Christian Arabs and Maghrebi Jews, and interrogate how open-minded and tolerant Orthodox Judaism can rightfully claim to be.
the film works in a peeping tom kind of way
But Zauberman’s question gives pause to many of those who first responded in the negative, and lets them ponder their stance at greater length. Some are genuinely perplexed as to how they would broach the issue, especially if it arose after the fact. It transpires that for some of the young Jews, the question is irrelevant given they’ve already done the deed with many lovers from different backgrounds. Though there’s an underlying hopefulness that such liaisons may one day be unremarkable, for now, it’s a fanciful notion that an Arab-Israeli love affair could succeed without obstacle.
The film works in a peeping tom kind of way, capturing people in unguarded moments, and the forthright honesty and immediacy of response has that compulsive, reality-TV element. The overall message seems to be that, on a personal level, co-existence and understanding is not such an abstract concept. Zauberman doesn’t really push much further or deeper than that; she visits a gay club and later puts her camera into the middle of a beach rave, but neither of these fresh locales broadens her line of questioning or analysis.
Regardless of its on-screen impact (no one expected the director to iron out the Arab-Israeli conflict in 86 minutes), it would be good if Would You Have Sex With an Arab? was a conversation starter at pubs and dinner parties the world over. The film works best as a conscience kickstarter; by taking the most complex regional dispute in global history and breaking it down to the most base human-on-human act, Zauberman clears the battlefield of all the complications that have gotten in the way of peaceful, meaningful conversation. Her film doesn’t dictate an important course of action or profess wisdom, but it certainly asks one very important question.
