March 13, 2014
The Attack – 2012,
Lebanon
How well do we know the ones we love? That question is at
the heart of Ziad Doueiri’s powerful film The
Attack, and for Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman), the answer to that question is
both jarring and heart-wrenching. Amin is a doctor who lives and works in Israel . He gets
along well with his co-workers and is so respected by his peers that towards
the beginning of the film, he is presented with a rather prestigious award. It
is, in a way, one of the most important moments of his life, for it represents
the culmination of so many things – his decision to pursue medicine, his
decision to work in Israel ,
his turning the check to patients who refuse to be examined by him, and his
ignoring of snide comments and derisive jeers. It is a moment that says as much
about his skills with his hands as it does about his ability to persevere and
triumph in the face of adversity. However, watching him closely, we get the
sense that he isn’t enjoying it as much as he should be. Perhaps that is
because his wife, Siham, is not there to share the moment with him. A day after
the award ceremony, a suicide bomber sets off an explosive in a packed
restaurant in Nazareth .
Seventeen people die – eleven of them children. Siham (Reymond Amsalem) is said
to have been the bomber.
Siham is the film’s great enigma, the specter that hangs
over every character, weighing them down with guilt and confusion, unleashing
the beast in some and the charity in others. The film opens with her in her
husband’s arms, tears streaming down her cheek. She tells him she loves him. He
tells her, “Every time you leave, a part of me dies.” These words reverberate
throughout the film, and by the time they are repeated, they have been given a
new, much more somber meaning than was originally intended.
The film is a reminder that to some acceptance does not
always equate to belonging, and as the film progresses, we are made to wonder
just how warmly Amin really was received by his peers and society as a whole.
Early in the film, we watch as an Israeli officer repeatedly shines his
flashlight in Amin’s face while checking his ID, and I couldn’t help wondering
if it was truly necessary. Hasn’t Amin been going to the same spot on his way
home from work for years? Shouldn’t someone recognize him by now? After the
bombing, things get worse for Amin, and his incarceration and subsequent interrogation
include tactics that have been labeled as human rights abuses. This is one of
the lasting consequences of terrorism – the tendency to resort to tactics that
you would criticize others for engaging in.
Through flashbacks, we see Amin and Siham in happier times,
and as the film progresses, earlier moments take on a significance that they
don’t have the first time we see them. Tears of joy become possible tears of
sorrow, and remarks that seem like passing comments must be rethought and
wrestled with. In the process, we, along with Amin, are forced to rethink all
that we know about the seemingly gentle woman he was married to for fifteen years.
A lesser film would have been content to draw traditional lines of good and
evil. However, The Attack resists
this, instead opting to try to make its audience understand what drives people
to commit terrible acts. In this way, Doueiri is similar to Hany Abu-Assad,
whose 2005 masterpiece Paradise Now
presented a realistic look at two young men’s decision to become suicide
bombers. By the end of that film, audiences grasped the situation without
condoning the protagonists’ decision. Here, Doueiri works with a similar
intention, and the results are the same: We understand without forgiving.
Eventually, as all films of this kind must, Amin sets out in
search of answers. Yet even here, the film never relinquishes its
realistic feel. Unlike other films in which non-detectives decide to get to
bottom of things, Amin does not suddenly sprout into a master detective, and
where his investigation takes him reveals an astonishing amount about the world
on the other side of the fence that divides Israel
and the Palestinian
Territories . There, we
see, nothing is simple. Good people can hate, bad people can be kind, killers
can be made into martyrs, and sermons that preach intolerance and violence are
praised as signifying the country’s resilience. At the end of the day, nothing
changes. A poster rises and falls; another will soon take its place. And more people
will likely die on both sides. The cycle never ends, and everyone is tired of
it.
The Attack is shocking,
moving, and compelling. It is a film which viewers will want to talk about long
after it is over. Its one real misstep occurs early when it foreshadows too
much too soon. It also unwisely insists on answering all of the mysteries it
creates, for if ever ambiguity should be acceptable, it is in a film of this
nature. However, even this aspect of the film is hard to completely criticize,
for in revealing everything, new details are revealed, details that once again
pull the strings on our emotions and saddle us with complex question and uneasy
emotions. Perhaps it could all have been prevented. (on DVD in Region 1)
4 stars
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