Review of Paradise Now (2005) by Elizabeth B — 06 Jan 2009

The filmmakers, their style, flair and technique all strictly behind the camera, the film purely, quietly, subtly occupies two days in the lives of Said, played by the fascinatingly taut and spare Kais Nashef, and Khaled, played by the more frantic Ali Suliman, two Palestinian car mechanics, best friends since childhood, who are enlisted to cross into Israel and execute a suicide bombing. Director Hany Abu-Assad doesn't depict them as extremists. They anticipate their mission like one would consider any tough job. The group that recruits them grants preparation, support, honor, shaves and haircuts, the niftiest suits they've ever worn in their lives, a ritual dinner, and an opportunity to make videos to be shown on television.

When religion has crossed the threshold into the framework of an act, it immediately confuses its implications: How noble is your sacrifice if you believe you will be instantaneously compensated for eternity?

On his video, inexpressive Said mutters the Palestinian position, stating resentment that the Israelis have stolen the position of victims he considers by right to shouldered by his own nation. Does this address make the film propaganda, or does it serve plainly as a document of what such a man would say in that position? This is not a controversial matter. If we are keen on a film that ushers us into the lives of suicide bombers, we must be touch on what makes them do what they do.

One takes into consideration the account given by Said at one point: "How can the occupiers be the victims, too?" But whether you agree or not with the stance, you will watch this drama, the strong, silent type, with a formidable interest, and perhaps a vandalistic inclination to project an implication upon it. Abu-Assad demoralizes the daring of his willing victims with day-to-day minutiae. In the course of one farewell message, the camera goes wrong. During another, one of the bombers takes the liberty of reminding his mom where to shop next time for milk. When the leader of the terrorist group comes to see the two men in person, he appears less like an enigmatic leader than an official who just wants to check this obligation off his list.

Then there is the issue of the woman with whom Said is apparently, depending on how one perceives his unabashed stoicism, beginning to form a deep connection. A Palestinian born in France and raised in Morocco, she has lofty standing in the community because she is the daughter of an honored leader. Nevertheless, she is not a believer in suicide bombings or other terrorism. Partial surely to the cynicism of the West, she distrusts terrorist acts on both spiritual and realistic arguments: Islam prohibits suicide, so rationally she is skeptical of whether or not a follower succeeds as a martyr. And she believes the result of the bombings is to claim blameless lives and instigate retribution in a never-ending sequence of war.

The director is himself apparently an Israel-born Palestinian. His crew included Palestinians, Israelis and Westerners, and at some stages of shooting was endangered by both sides in the war. And just as we Westerners are too constantly guilty of, such primitive actions further empowered the film's depictions. Still and meditative, this picture is courageously risky on account of its neutrality, its objective notice of the tangible applied course of action by which volunteers are indoctrinated and primed for the undertaking of ruin, not progression.

This passive work familiarizes us with terrorists. No, it doesn't make us sympathetic, but it makes us pity the chronicled situation. Why would so many expend their lives, futures, families and capabilities without even the question of why those who send you do not go themselves?

In a way, films about religious extremists, just as the real-life accounts do, frustrate me intellectually at the same time they move me emotionally. I am completely lost when I attempt to understand how so many people convince themselves impartially that their assessments are honorable. But religion is concerned. When religion is involved, suddenly the answer to this question is opaque and intractible, as religion supplies an inscrutable underlying principle. The dilemma is that all religions make this cut-rate benefit available. When divine entities are called to mind to substantiate destruction and chaos in the world they have supposedly created to thrive, is one rewarded in death?