Divine Intervention By Amira Jarmakani Amira Jarmakani is a student in the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts at Emory University. She studies Arab American and Arab Women's literature and is currently working on representations of Arab women in US popular culture.

The writing is on the wall. Both the graffiti next to the out-of-use bus stop and the post-it note revealed as the automatic car window is raised read “I am crazy because I love you,” a phrase which fairly accurately describes the assemblage of tension-filled and conflict-ridden scenes that weave an intricate web of a story about Palestinian life in Israel and Occupied Palestine.

Written and directed by Elia Suleiman, Divine Intervention is loosely organized around the lives of three main characters: E.S. (played by Elia Suleiman), [E.S.’s] Father (played by Nayef Daher), and The Woman (played by Manal Khader). The storyline, rather than being presented as a linear narrative, is a series of powerfully intertwined scenes, shot from constantly shifting perspectives that are able to simultaneously highlight points of rupture as well as overlap.

The first section of the film, sardonically titled “Chronicles of Love and Pain,” follows E.S.’s father through the mundane banalities of everyday life, which, in turn, sparks the telling of the story of Palestinians living in the Israeli city of Nazareth. The section, which begins with a set of seemingly unrelated scenes, gradually spindles outward toward moments of increasingly charged intersection: A man waiting at a bus-stop is informed that there is no bus coming. He doesn’t respond. Several scenes later, the man in informed again that the bus is not coming. He answers, “I know.” Several scenes later he is observed yet again waiting for a bus that will not come, which causes the neighboring onlooker to practically explode with frustration. The power of this vignette lies not only in its ability to depict the lived absurdity of waiting for that which will not come (a sense of peace and security in the region), but also in its capacity to capture the way in which the seemingly static state of waiting fosters a frustrated dynamism in the everyday relationships of people. There is more: Two older men watch a young boy practicing his agility at dribbling a soccer ball. When the ball accidentally lands on another man’s roof, he walks out, picks up the soccer ball, and pierces the surface, ruining it. The next scene depicts the soccer boy’s father going to his neighbor’s house and beating him up. Several scenes later, the boy once again practices his dribbling under the indifferent eye of the two older men. Once again, his ball accidentally lands on the neighbor’s roof. The scene once again cuts to the father walking to his neighbor’s house. However, this time, before he gets there, the camera cuts to a wide-angle perspective on three men violently beating a visibly obstructed object. When they finish beating it with sticks, they open fire, and after they are done shooting, they wait for a boy to bring a can of gasoline so they can set fire to it. The humorous relief that washes over the viewer when the scene finally reveals a snake to be the target of these men’s intense fury is quickly followed by thinly veiled unease at the realization that it would not have been entirely shocking or unexpected to find a human at the other end of their fear and anger. Indeed, the quiet poignancy of Suleiman’s film emanates from his ability to set up scenes that revel in the prolonged moment of tension that precedes the explosion of violence, force, or emotion.

Just as we feel that we are on the brink of a surfeit of tension for this dizzying community, the father collapses and the film transitions into another series of situations, all of which are viewed from or punctuated by the powerful presence of borders and blockades; specifically, much of the film takes place at the checkpoint between Ramallah and Jerusalem. A clearly innocuous shot of E.S. eating an apricot while driving to the hospital to see his father foreshadows the more volcanic nature of the second part of the film, since he happens to throw out the seed of his apricot precisely at the same moment that he passes by a tank, which promptly explodes. The irony of the fact that the most fiery explosion of the film comes at the hands of an apricot seed is not lost on the viewer, who has just witnessed the diffusion of intense human conflict when the men are revealed to be beating and shooting a snake instead of one of their neighbors. It is exactly this sort of dramatic juxtaposition that characterizes the latter part of the film as determined by the nature of borders and boundaries. The protagonists of this section, E.S. and The Woman, are not just affected by the checkpoint that separates them; their relationship is defined by the checkpoint, which is where they spend most of their time. Conflict in this part of the movie is delivered at rapid gunfire pace rather than as the result of careful build up and is characterized by the deliberate gaze of confrontation (The Woman as she walks across the checkpoint and E.S. as he silently challenges a man wearing a yamaka as they sit in their cars at a stoplight) and the creative re-appropriation of common markers of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (the Ninja/Matrix scene during which The Woman uses daggers decorated with Islamic symbols, a bagful of stones and rocks, and a kuffiya to defend herself from armed attackers.) The denouement of the juxtaposing scenes immediately follows the image of E.S. and the Israeli man in the car next to him locked in intense stare: Suleiman cuts to a close up of what appears to be two men arm wrestling. However, the angle widens to disclose a shot of E.S. helping his father get up from the bed where he has been resting. Here, Suleiman masterfully crafts the message that a change in perspective can change the nature of the conflict.

Dotting the filmic landscape is the meta-narrative of E.S. both contemplating and rearranging post-it notes, on which are written the actions and scenes of the movie. It is telling that the only one of these post-it notes to cross over into another scene in the movie is the one that reads, “I am crazy because I love you.” The fact that it resurfaces three times (as graffiti at the bus stop, as a post-it on E.S.’s wall, and when he transfers the post-it to his automatic car window) indicates that Suleiman is begging the audience to sit with the ambiguity of the statement that can be understood as saying both “I am crazy to love you” as well as “Loving you has made me crazy.” Similarly, he demands a complex reading of seemingly straightforward scenes tempered by the intricacy of multiple perspectives. In the final analysis, the meta-technique of the post-its asks questions about the relationship of storytelling to the events and sequences it describes, provoking the contemplation of the nature of truth and storytelling. Faced with the task of representing a conflict that has been overdetermined by binary tropes of us/them, good/bad, and right/wrong, Suleiman delivers the challenge – and presents the possibility – of telling the story in brilliant confusion, riddled as it is with resistance and complexity.

                                                                 © FILM JOURNAL 2002