Review of Paradise Now (2005) by Grant W — 19 Jun 2008

There is something decidedly amateurish about this film. I'm reminded of the seeming conundrum that so many great novels are the first from a particular author (and sometimes the only), the idea that in the first outing there is a certain rawness and clarity of purpose that loses itself in later works.

Of course, most first novels aren't great; but why not? Most of the time, because they're trying to say what they have to say with someone else's voice. Most first novels are amalgams of other writers, and they don't quite work on their own.

I have no idea whether this movie is a first for the people involved (nor I do find the information particularly relevant), but that's what this felt like. Not a great first novel, but a medicore one, telling an important, valuable, personal story with someone else's voice.

This doesn't make it a bad film--because it is an important, valuable, personal story, one that needs to be told again and again and again until people are willing to hear it, especially in the present.

The typical dangers of doing such a topical film are mostly avoided, for (for the most part) the film is smartly sedate and composed about its subject. The parts where it falls down are the parts where it reaches for a greater audience--where the characters launch into unrealistic arguments over the merits of suicide bombing and other means of resistance to the Israeli occupation, or, as in the final sequence, the director gives us an awkwardly pompous series of shots of the various characters turning towards the screen with absurd profoundness, like some empty summer blockbuster.

The rest of the film though, when it's focused on the characters and the minute (perhaps "trivial") details of their lives, are great, as the simple plot works to emphasize that, as horrifying as it is, none of this is really out of the ordinary.

And that's when the film is at its best, when it's (unconsciously, I think, but perhaps intentionally) completely and utterly Palestinian--when the suicide bombers' taped final statements are comically fucked-up, when no characters even bothers to question whether or not the Israeli occupation is legitimate (imagine an American or even European film doing that, just taking for granted that Israel is not a victim but a criminal state--it's mind-boggling).

So this is a good film, perhaps a great one, for all the moments when it's trying to be nothing other than itself.