Most of these film pieces of mine arrive here from the past. This is the case with this one, as the topical references, such as those to Sharon and Arafat, attest.
For much of its length a formally brilliant satirical comedy, Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention: A Chronicle of Love and Pain (Yadon ilaheyya) addresses the curbed and combustible lives of Palestinians and Israelis living in territories occupied by the Israeli army. As many have noted, the witty vignettes that Suleiman—an Arab Israeli, by the way, and Christian, not Muslim—strings together, with a spot of blackout between each consecutive two, have about them a palpable air of the sensibility of Jacques Tati’s comedies, although, disingenuously, Suleiman denies familiarity with Tati’s films. The elliptical and (mostly) materialistic style of the film, however, suggests as another influence Robert Bresson, familiarity with whose work (which, perversely, he finds funny) Suleiman does admit to. The film also references The Red Balloon and The Matrix, and its splendid use of observant long-shots also attests to Abbas Kiarostami’s influence. I found the film nothing short of astonishing in its capacity to absorb all these influences while yet retaining freshness and originality. Divine Intervention won the jury prize at Cannes in 2002.
The film begins on a striking note, with a vignette involving a man in a Santa Claus suit, a knife stabbed into him, being chased by a pack of angry children as presents drop from his torn sack. (It’s often not possible to distinguish between Palestinians and Israelis among the film’s contentious neighbors, but this Santa, it seems to me, couldn’t be either; perhaps he has dropped from the sky.) The setting is the hills of Nazareth, Jesus’s old haunt and Suleiman’s own birthplace. Suleiman has remarked that he hates Santa and hopes “my hatred of Santa Claus will spread all over the world,” explaining: “I associate Santa with a nauseating sweetness. . . . Every year, Santa Claus comes with his jingle bells and the world is going to its doom.” This opening vignette isn’t as violent as it may seem; Santa, we see later, peripherally, in a hospital scene, is being attended to and is okay. But the opening delivers a surprise, perhaps even a shock, and this predicts the sort of mordant humor that will follow. It also predicts the intensely personal nature of the film—and it is this that helps explain how Suleiman can borrow so much from other films and still come up with something that is absolutely his.
Early on, subsequent vignettes posit tension in the lives of Palestinians, individually and amongst one another. A man is swamped by mail, much of it from the government, which he reads as calmly as he can as he sits in his sunlit kitchen: an exceptionally witty translation of Chinese water torture, where drip after drip has instead become one piece of mail after another. Someone waiting for a bus that he knows won’t be coming (a wonderful metaphor conjoining Palestinian despair and expectancy) incurs the annoyance of someone living close to the bus stop; implicitly, both men are in the grip of the fact that the Occupation has disconnected and undone routine and vital services such as bus transportation. Another soul routinely tosses his carefully bagged garbage into a neighbor’s domain, inviting like retaliation. As he walks down a narrow street, a boy bouncing a soccer ball off various parts of his body, including foot and head, becomes another neighborhood irritant, even though he’s just a kid doing what kids do. When the ball accidentally lands on someone’s roof, the owner of the property punctures and deflates the ball, rendering it, if you will, impotent, and we instantly understand—because that’s how pointedly brilliant Suleiman’s humor can be—how impotent the adult feels if he happens to be Palestinian, how he is projecting this feeling onto the boy and the boy’s ball because that’s a small way he still possesses to assert his own sense of self-determination, and how this assertion of his property rights is a frustrated veiled assault on the Occupation itself, which has divested him and others of the sense of being able to call much, if anything, their own any longer. If the property owner is, in fact, Israeli, however, the deflation of the ball becomes a symbolic assault on Palestinian youth. And if the boy is Israeli, of course, we are back to his being an innocent reminder of Palestinian impotence ripe for the assault on his soccer ball by way of imaginative compensation. Suleiman’s decision not always to identify which are Israelis, which are Palestinians, thus blossoms into a gracious satirical vision of losers all around. Such small things as Suleiman lights on, one after the other, and each thing, and all of them cumulatively, moreover, thus contribute to a funny, sometimes hilarious, portrait of an agitated and endlessly unpleasant situation. This is the best part of Suleiman’s film.
At first, we think that the protagonist is the older man with the mountain of mail to make his way through daily: a variation (I thought) of Sisyphus. We watch this man riding around deriding and cursing his neighbors and anyone else crossing his path; he is venting his anger, privately, to keep from exploding. It turns out, however, that this man is really the father of the film’s protagonist, E.S., who is played by none other than the scenarist-filmmaker, Elia Suleiman. (The father eventually suffers cardiac arrest—his collapse at home ironically recalls the collapse of the bicycle in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess (1953)—and dies at hospital. Suleiman has dedicated the film to the memory of his father.) Suleiman’s own appearance makes for a darker turn in the film, one in which the focus of Palestinian frustration and humiliation is the roadway checkpoints where Israeli soldiers, often preening with arrogance and gross disrespect, stop all Palestinian commuters and drivers, frequently, endlessly, hassling them. E.S. becomes a silent observer of such a scene, the Jerusalem-Ramallah checkpoint dividing nonrestricted and restricted areas, for the lot beyond this checkpoint becomes the point of rendezvous between E.S. and his gorgeous girlfriend, each coming by car and checking into his as they might into a hotel or into one of their homes. The restrictive border requires this; the man can’t visit the woman in her home, and she can’t visit him in his. Instead of having sex, they must make do with continually, flexibly, folding a hand into the other’s hand—a way of extracting the maximum erotic benefit of touch from their necessarily constrained sensual encounters. (These shots of sea anemone-like fingers caressing accumulate into a metaphor for surreptitious adaptability—creative “making do.”) Silently, the two watch activity at the checkpoint; sometimes E.S., alone, parks and watches. Much in these scenes consists of reaction shots of E.S.’s blank face, behind which, we are given to understand, anger and resentment simmer.
Who on earth hasn’t seen Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon (1956), with those shots of the balloon sailing above Paris? E.S. certainly has! Thus he arranges a marvelous method for distracting the Israelis so that he and his girlfriend can go to her home and make love. (At this point I may be misremembering; I really can’t recall whether the pair go to her place or his.) The silence of the scene—Divine Intervention is largely silent—punctuates the humor: the inflation of a red balloon; the opening of the parked car’s top; the balloon’s ascension. Why should this prove such a distraction for Israeli soldiers? The balloon bears the likeness of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat. While soldiers don’t know what to do with this monstrous occurrence (should they shoot down the offending and possibly incendiary terrorist image?), the lovers take off.
Suleiman’s selfconsciousness gets the better of him when he fails to show the couple making love, a chasteness that suggests the film’s whitewashing tendency. Formally, the film is remarkable nevertheless (perhaps even a work of genius), and early on the satire is both apt and gracious; but Suleiman’s increasing one-sidedness miscalculates the effect of his humor. For example, the blown-up image of Arafat’s smiling face grates. For many Palestinians, Arafat may be some sort of tribal hero or symbol of the Palestinian nation that their hopes pursue; to most civilized people, though, he is a mass murderer of Jews, one of the most evil men now in two centuries.
Indeed, this film, sterling in so many ways, lacks all reasonable contextuality. For instance, there isn’t a jot of an attempt to explain the reason for the Israeli Occupation: from lands surrounding the original borders of Israel, the launching of unprovoked wars and terrorist assaults on Israeli civilians as well as soldiers. Suleiman’s hatred of Israel (as we shall see) is palpable; he has referred to Israel (in an interview in Cinéaste) as a fascist state. Given the Nazi history that made necessary the formalization of the modern state of Israel (in fact, the presence of Jews in the Holy Land has gone on uninterrupted from time immemorial, even after the Roman conquest in the year 70), the application of such a word as fascism to the Jewish state is calculated to inflict the most barbarous sort of pain. A half-dozen or so years ago, Israeli peace activists investigating Israeli documents corroborated significant Palestinian claims pertaining to the forced exit of Palestinians from what is now Israel in 1947-48; does Suleiman not comprehend that such activity, like the stream of Israeli Supreme Court decisions curbing the presumptions of various Israeli governments, is not possible in a fascist state? There is too much relevant history to touch on here, but since I noted the expulsion of Palestinians let us also recall that Israel, as its territory was legally drawn, accounted for only one-fourth of the historic Palestine; Jordan, an Arab state, for instance, accounted for a larger part, the West Bank-part of Palestine, and indeed it was long assumed that displaced Palestinians would settle in Jordan.
Why then the pan-Arab mania now for a Palestinian state carved out of Israel? Historically fractious amongst themselves, Arabs have found a basis for unity in the campaign of hatred against Israel that they have waged; Arabs, additionally, through the “Palestinian issue” seek to deflect world attention from the politically antediluvian nature of their undemocratic states. Hating Jews, and often fueled by their Islamic faith, Middle Eastern Arabs raise their children to hate Jews; these children are taught to hate Jews at home, at school and at mosque. The recent notion that Palestinians hate Jews, or Zionism (the cover they sometimes use to deny even hating Jews), because of things the Israelis have actually done to them is preposterous. On the contrary, Palestinian hatred of Jews is historical. In From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, Joan Peters writes, “Imbued with religious prejudice, the Muslims of Palestine erupted into anti-Jewish violence often, and at the call of the Muslim leaders, long before [modern] Israel [existed].” Hatred such as Palestinians bear and Arafat represents finds “reasons” to justify itself, and other-Arab manipulation of the issue of Palestinian homelessness has (in both senses) religiously sought to inflame this hatred, even to the point now reached that Palestinian lives are routinely ruined for the sake of continuing this practice of hate. Israeli occupation would have ended long ago had Palestinians accepted Israel’s right to exist and ended their murderous ramage of terrorist attacks. When he portrays Israeli soldiers as nasty and arrogant, Suleiman shows the lack of sympathetic imagination that his one-sidedness imposes; for a rudimentary grasp of human psychology suggests that the behavior he undoubtedly sees often masks the fear (for which they are compensating) that these young Israelis justifiably feel in such close proximity to Palestinians. You might never guess from this film that it is Palestinians who aggress even to the point of murder against Israelis, and that Israeli violence against Palestinians (except for rare deplorable incidents inspired by the very atmosphere that Palestinian terrorism provides) is reactive and self-defensive. Suleiman insists on rewriting reality to make Palestinians the victims—and indeed victims they are, of their own dogmatic hatred of Jews, other-Arab manipulation of their plight, and their failure to recall collectively their own history.
One of the most perplexing aspects of Divine Intervention is indeed the fact that, if the Israeli Occupation is even ten times worse than Suleiman shows, it represents historically a mild, not a particularly virulent, occupation. To be sure, for the overwhelming majority of his film Suleiman, pursuing light satirical comedy, avoids overt violence. (Suleiman has insisted he opposes violence of any kind, and I take him at his word.) But there is something heartless about his exclusion of the fact that Palestinian groups, such as Hamas, are as dedicated to the eradication of Jewry as were the Nazis. It is certainly humorous that in the film a balloon with Arafat’s ugly puss on it causes such anxiety for Israeli soldiers. However, the implication is close to sickening: Israel needs only to vacate areas their forces occupy to spare themselves the to-do about something that is in fact intrinsically non-threatening. The fact is, Palestinian criminals, including suicide bombers, really attack and really kill innocent Israelis, and as a result Israel finds itself between a rock and a hard place, where its existence is equally imperiled by these attacks and others (Israel has been under seige from Middle Eastern Arabs for the duration of its existence) and, from within, by its loosening grip on the tradition of Jewish humanism that has helped sustain its increasingly secular existence. Ironically, Palestinian violence against Israelis is responsible for the Israeli election of hardliner Ariel Sharon (even at that, the election was a squeaker), and now Jews worldwide must scratch their heads at the spectacle of an Israeli government so right-wing that Sharon—Sharon!—often finds himself isolated on the left end of the ruling coalition.
In summary, Israeli actions against Palestinians are reactive and self-defensive, while Palestinian actions against Israelis are fueled by their historic hatred of Jews and by other-Arab (and their own) incitement of their feelings of having gotten the short end of the stick when modern Israel was created to maintain the historic habitation of Jews and to provide also a home for displaced European Jews, survivors of the Holocaust. For Suleiman, as he does in the Cinéaste interview, to speak of “the racist consequences of Zionism” defies belief. It is this determination of his to rewrite recent history to the advantage of Palestinians and the disadvantage of Jews that leads him into the third, and darkest, phase of his film. Formally, the scene may be the film’s most astounding one; morally, it is dubious.
E.S.’s girlfriend evaporates, appearing instead on a gigantic billboard promising a day of Palestinian reckoning against Jews. This image represents the “divine intervention” that is the best that Palestinians can hope for to redress what Suleiman’s film fails to disclose is almost entirely their self-inflicted and other-Arab-inflicted plight. This image materializes as an actual presence as a group of Israeli soldiers train and practice on an artillery range. A spiritual force, however, and psychologically a wish-fulfillment fantasy, she is immune to all the soldiers’ attempts to shoot her down, and whirling up into the sky to become a Ninja figure crowned by a reconfigured halo of the soldiers’ bullets (this is awesome stuff), she proceeds to kill, one by one, all the soldiers who failed to kill her. We are left with a field populated by Jewish corpses—for Suleiman, perhaps (as a friend put it), a visionary release of all the frustration pent up in E.S., and other Palestinians he represents, as a result of the Occupation; for me, in a reduced, highly compressed form, a giddy, gleeful image of the Holocaust. It is perhaps the case that Suleiman drew no such conscious connection in his mind, but it’s precisely his hatred of Jews (which his description of his humor as being “conceptually Jewish” attempts to hide, from himself and others) that has obscured for him a connection that cannot help but arise from the visual materials he presents. Any representation of the mass murder of Jews necessarily invokes the Holocaust, no matter what an artist’s intentions may be, no matter how dense his or her denials.
Suleiman has made a very fine film, one, of course, that everyone ought to see. I like the fact that the satire deepens and darkens, and increasingly, formally, leaves naturalism behind (from balloon to Ninja, both in the heavens); all this is visually exciting. But just as Suleiman fails to make his case that the Occupation killed his father (people do die of heart attacks in unoccupied Arab countries as well), his spectacular scene of Jewish slaughter is way out of his control, especially in terms of its more dire implications. It’s a fantasy, yes. Regrettably, the relentless Palestinian killing of innocent Jews is the reality that Suleiman fails everywhere to acknowledge, and this failure has seriously damaged his valuable film.
