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DIVINE INTERVENTION
Elia Suleiman, France/Morocco/Germany/Palestine, 2002
Saturday 6 March 2004 10pm-11.30pm; rpt Friday 12 March midnight-1.30am
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In Divine Intervention, Palestinian writer-director Elia Suleiman conveys the farcical absurdity of life in the Occupied Territories by using a series of surreal vignettes. Each scene helps construct a mosaic which reveals the reality of the Palestine-Israeli situation in Jerusalem and Nazareth. Some of the incidents shock, others bewilder, but most have a rapid, sketch-show humour with bungling cops, unreasonable neighbours and vindictive old men spitefully spinning across Suleiman's Theatre of the Absurd.
The director appears 30 minutes into the film playing a ponderous filmmaker known as ES. A plot begins to elbow the succession of sketches to one side and although the film still finds time for digressions, this gradually becomes a chronicle of ES's romance with a beautiful woman who makes her entrance in a scene of simmering violence, loud music and improbable imagery. Their relationship is complicated by the social and political divisions which wrack the region, and by the ailing health of ES's rancorous father, who at times embodies their beleaguered country. Divine Intervention remains more of a romantic calamity than comedy, however, with an unexpectedly powerful ending.
Suleiman's direction is strong and simple. Much of the film is shot with a static camera conveying a series of moments as opposed to recreating a sequence of events. The lively music and abundance of quirky characters emphasise a madness which, Suleiman's film suggests, is cursing his nation.
Gavin Collinson
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Cyber Palestine (Elia Suleiman, 1999)
