The Daily Star – Arts & Culture – 'Paradise Now,' what's next?
The Daily Star – Arts & Culture – ‘Paradise Now,’ what’s next?
‘Paradise Now,’ what’s next?
Hany Abu-Assad discusses making art that is full of politics but free of rage
By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff
Thursday, May 04, 2006
‘Paradise Now,’ what’s next?
Interview
BEIRUT: “My aim is to make art that lasts, not a piece of analysis. There are political scientists to do that.”Hany Abu-Assad is talking about his next project. This is an exotic turn for the Netherlands-based Palestinian filmmaker who has been doing variations of the same interview for the last year and a half – all in support of his last project, “Paradise Now.”
That film won a plethora of awards, including the Blue Angel for Best European Film at the 2005 Berlin Film Festival, the Amnesty International Award and the Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Film. It was Palestine’s official entry for best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.
Awards and critical praise were balanced by controversy.
“Paradise Now” tells the story of Khaled (Ali Suliman) and Said (Kais Nashef), childhood friends from the West Bank town of Nablus who’ve been selected to carry out a suicide operation in Tel Aviv.
Both men, and their dead-end working class existence, could be transplanted anywhere in the world – were it not for the Israeli occupation and the ambient humiliation it causes.
Khaled is so lumbered with inchoate rage that he can’t hold down a job. Said’s father was executed as a collaborator, leaving him weighed down by an ambivalent mix of shame and hatred for the occupation that made his father a traitor.
When the resistance calls on them to sacrifice themselves, they accept.
Said’s foil, in more ways than one, is Suha (Lubna Azabal), the daughter of a slain resistance leader returned from overseas. She works with a human rights NGO and opposes any militancy that gives Israeli soldiers an excuse to kill more Palestinians.
The film begins shortly before Khaled and Said are given their mission and follows them as they prepare but then find it impossible to carry out the operation as planned. This gives both men an opportunity to re-evaluate.
As Abu-Assad has pointed out in previous interviews, “Paradise Now” is a thriller – a genre to which contemporary Palestine is particularly well suited. It’s an unusually well-devised thriller, leading the audience through an uncharacteristically human depiction of what can be wrought from humiliation and rage.
It does so without being unremittingly bleak. There are several moments of dark humor here.
“Life is neither exclusively comic nor tragic,” the writer-director says. “And when you move from comedy to tragedy … it’s the shift in direction that makes you feel.”
“Paradise Now” works because it conforms to the genre conventions of a thriller but it’s cleverer than that. Abu-Assad is a knowing critic of how the Palestinian condition is represented in the media and it’s no accident that much of the film’s humor is embedded in scenes concerned with media representation.
One such scene depicts Said having his portrait taken in an old-fashioned photography studio – one which turns a good trade selling and renting the video-taped last words of suicide bombers along with the pre-execution confessions of collaborators.
Another, perhaps the film’s more masterful and hilarious sequence, features Khaled trying to record his own Koran-inflected martyr’s video – while the camera operator struggles with faulty equipment and militants dig in to the sandwiches his mother has packed for him. It isn’t the only time the film deflates suicide bombers’ supposedly religious motives.
Another such scene, particularly provocative for some in Israel’s critical community, shows Said, Khaled and their companions as they settle in for their last meal. The vista recreates Da Vinci’s “The Last Supper” – albeit updated with Kalashnikovs and a florescent lamp.
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“The point is to retell the story of ‘The Last Supper,'” says Abu-Assad, “to represent the picture from a different perspective. It’s the right of every artist to do so. Da Vinci has Jesus’ upturned face bathed in heavenly light. Here there’s a florescent lamp. No one’s looking up. The perspective is human, not divine.”
“Paradise Now” is exceptional because it is suffused with outrage at the Palestinian condition without allowing the film’s politics to overwhelm its aesthetics. As such it defies both those who say “political art” is a contradiction in terms, and others who say artists in conflict situations are too close to the politics to remake it as lasting art.
“It’s for history to decide whether the art we make today will last … In fact there’s no formula for this,” Abu-Assad shrugs. “But this: You must keep your art safe from your rage.”
Abu-Assad’s next project, tentatively called “LA Cairo,” will be shot in America. He’s one of 10 international filmmakers approached by the American production company DViant Films to make an “American Dream” movie.
“LA Cairo” will be utterly different from “Paradise Now” but, based on a brief plot summary, it promises to be marked by the same humorous drama as his other work.
The director is keeping mum about most details but the story centers on a famous Egyptian actor who gets a casting call from Steven Spielberg. The actor envisions following the iconic Omar Sharif down the Western road to fame, but finds the realities of post-9/11 America don’t meet his expectations.
“Of course the whole business about how Arabs and Muslims are treated in America since September 11, runs throughout the story,” says Abu-Assad, “but that’s not really what the film’s about.
“It’s about an actor wanting to recreate his fame and status in America and what he actually finds there. It’s about the quest for eternal youth, really.” He smiles. “And it’s about how he views the American dream and how Americans view the American dream and how Americans view the way others view the American dream.”
It’s yet to be seen whether Abu-Assad will continue to keep his art safe from his rage. To this point, however, he’s been unusually successful at pressing politically-informed realities into the service of art. The aesthetic is all the more striking for the fact that his framing reference is conflict.
“The last war in the Middle East,” he says, “is a cultural war. If you don’t make an art that will last throughout history, you lose. I want to make an art that depicts the specific but implies the universal, an art that will still have meaning in 200 years.
“Why shouldn’t we have such art? There’s nothing in our culture that’s inferior to that in the West. It just so happens the West now has the hegemonic culture …
“Keeping a culture alive and vibrant when a people have been defeated militarily and politically – it’s a huge challenge. The example to follow, I think, is in the Jewish Book. For me the Bible’s the ultimate art book … The Jews understood that it’s culture, the book that sustains a community.
“I worked in aeronautical engineering before I started making films,” Abu-Assad smiles. “It takes an unbelievable amount of intelligence, research and development to design, build and fly a fighter plane. But in the end all it does is destroy. Or is destroyed.”
Hany Abu-Assad’s film “Paradise Now” opens tonight in movie theaters throughout greater Beirut.
