The Insult--A nominee for best foreign-language Oscar this year, this drama from Lebanon, one of the most compelling, absorbing movies I've seen in a while, starts over a drainpipe.
Tony (Adel Karam), a forty-something Christian mechanic and garage owner, gets into a petty dispute over his balcony drain with Yasser (Kamel El Basha), a Palestinian construction foreman working in Tony's Beirut neighborhood. Yasser throws an obscenity at Tony, and Tony demands an apology from Yasser's boss. When Yasser, who lives in a refugee camp and whose employment is tenuous, can't spit out an apology he feels he doesn't owe, Tony flings a pretty intolerable ethnic taunt at Nasser, who lashes out violently.
From there, this tale directed by Zaid Doueiri from a script he co-wrote with Joelle Touma escalates into courtroom drama, domestic crises, violent clashes in the street and, gradually, into a national epic exploring the lingering hatreds of the Civil War of the mid-'70s to the early '90s. Building all this turbulence around an ugly but minor altercation between two guys gives the film the flavor of a classic short story, like something by Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.
What keeps the device from feeling pat is Doueiri's confident directorial touch, as well as the performances, not only of the leads but of the supporting players. Camille Salameh as Tony's wily, grandstanding lawyer, Diamand Bou Abboud as Yasser's quietly principled (though not agenda-less) defender and Rita Hayek as Tony's beautiful, good-hearted but fed-up younger wife, among others, humanize the conflict.
But it's the leads that give The Insult its force. Karam and El Basha are both commanding, virile presences, and Doueiri and Touma cunningly show us that Tony and Yasser are similar men--bitter, short-fused and stubborn, but also honorable on their own terms. In the American vernacular, they're stand-up guys, embarrassed that the whole thing has gotten so far but unable to give it up. Privately both of them, as well as their often critical families and allies, are even shown to be sensitive to the injustices suffered by the other side in the case. You get the sense that they could be friends, and the impossibility of this is what makes the movie sting.
Yet there's a level at which American audiences, indeed probably any non-Lebanese or non-Middle-Eastern audiences, won't be able to understand The Insult. The context is too obscure, too complicated, too confusing, and the depth of these resentments too intense for us to grasp. We're likely see the dispute only in terms of the specific personalities of the characters, and on those terms it was hard for me to find Tony sympathetic, despite Karam's likability. Yasser's insult is personal (and justified), while Tony's is openly bigoted and vicious. It's clear that his Christianity is factional and cultural rather than philosophical; at one point he flatly states "I'm not a Jesus Christ who'll turn the other cheek."
Counterbalancing this, of course, is the legal and moral principle that one shouldn't respond to a verbal attack with a physical attack. Even so, on an emotional level I was pulling for Yasser, and I expect I won't be alone in that.
This response on my part would likely confirm Tony in his sense of grievance that Palestinians are given kid-glove treatment by the Lebanese left, like Yasser's lawyer and, in Tony's view, the courts. It's here that Americans may get some insight into the social and political knot that's depicted: We often hear the same sort of petulance from right-wing whites, especially evangelicals, interpreting any sympathy or even acknowledgement of minority disadvantage as a backhanded aggression.
Doueiri understands that this kind of enmity is too intractable to be resolved, and yet somehow the end of The Insult has a moving, and oddly convincing, sense of serenity and uplift that's hard to explain. It's as if the protraction of their squabble has given Yasser and Tony, and maybe even their respective camps, a mutual exhaustion that offers its own sort of intimacy and emotional release, regardless of the outcome of the case. It's a thin, highly tentative sort of reconciliation, but for an honest audience, anything more optimistic would be an insult.
No comments:
Post a Comment