Wedding in Galilee (1987, Israeli, in Arabic with some Hebrew) is writer/director Michel Khleifi's intimate portrayal of overlapping romantic, familial and nationalistic tensions in a northern Israeli Arab village. It was an critic's award winning film in Cannes that year, and is fairly well-known among world cinema circles, but I'd never seen it until now. Ultimately, the picture that the film presents is one of Palestinian impotence, of stifled desires and pent-up frustrations.
An Arab patriarch, Mukhtar (Mohamad Ali El Akili) tries to plan the wedding of his eldest son in spite of the Israeli military governor's curfew. In order to get permission to hold the ceremony, he has to invite the military officials, which rouses the anger of the inhabitants of the town where he is revered as one of the respected men on the village council. Most of the film takes place over the course of a single day and night, as typical wedding-day chaos (vengeful ex-girlfriends, a runaway horse, family gossip and backbiting in-laws) collides with the nationalist and ethnic conflicts between the Arab Muslim villagers and the occupying soldiers. The Israelis are painted as gruff, aloof and domineering but not explicitly violent. Palestinian women are hot-tempered, graceful and powerful behind the scenes of a patriarchal traditional society. The group that comes off worst are the Arab men. Even Mukhtar, respected and sage as he is, is hidebound by superstition. The enraged Arab villagers are unable to carry out the attack which they laboriously and incompetently plan. Even the groom himself is ultimately impotent. All the tensions in the movie, which build over the course of the carefully drawn-out two hours, are ultimately stifled and repressed, both internally and by outsiders, which is Khliefi's perception of the status of the Palestinian people. While the film is ocasionally a bit didactic, its care and craft are undeniable, and the psyches of the characters emerge distinctly albeit slowly.
There's a definite erotic heat which charges some of the scenes-the dressing of the bride and groom, the fire of a young Arab woman who taunts a handsome Israeli soldier, and most of all the transformation of a shy Israeli soldier into a ravishing Arab princess, thanks to a massage and makeover at the hands of the villagers. Arab cinema tends to be a bit paternalistic in gender relations, but this Belgian/Palestinian/Israeli production is downright scandalous at times. The only part of the movie that doesn't quite ring true in my ears is the Hebrew: Khliefi gets away with some of it by presenting some of the Jewish soldiers (including the military governor) as immigrants from the Arab-speaking world, but everyone speaks with a definite Arabic accent and the intonations are all strange. If the film were made today, I imagine Israeli actors could have been found to play such roles.
Michael Zwirn mzwirn01@tufts.edu ICQ #12755821 Kibbutz Music Reviews: http://www.tufts.edu/~mzwirn01/kibbutz.html Current: Sarah Slean, Emm Gryner, Mia Sheard
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