The latest movie from the Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad ('Paradise Now,' 'Omar') is a well-acted thriller undermined by its bifurcated structure.
will not be surprised by his skill at locating new sources of visceral and moral suspense — and also fresh grounds for multifaceted argument — within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But his specific focus on the plight of Palestinian women is new and gratifying. Working with cinematographers Ehab Assal and Peter Flinckenberg, Abu-Assad continually boxes his female leads into tight corners, visually and dramatically.
Huda and Reem are two very different women in peril: one older, stoic and cynical, the other younger, anxious and naive. But after their fateful opening encounter, they also inhabit two very different dramatic modes, the repeated juxtaposition of which finally makes more intellectual than dramatic sense. Reem’s story is a tense realist thriller, but the act of cutting repeatedly to and away from her plight winds up compartmentalizing rather than deepening her anguish.
Huda’s story, by contrast, is a rhetorical two-hander that hovers at the edge of abstraction. You can imagine it working superbly onstage; shot in pools of darkness illuminated only by the glare of an interrogation lamp, it finds Huda and Hasan, two fighters at ideological and tactical cross-purposes, coming to a grudging respect for one another, even as it’s clear there’s only one way this particular story can end.
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