Film presents unique look at terrorists

After watching director Hany Abu-Assad’s “Paradise Now,” films such as Adolf Hitler biopic “Downfall” rush to mind.

When a director humanizes a historical demon such as Hitler, moviegoers are seldom able to watch with any sort of neutrality.

But with “Paradise Now,” the intensity of Oliver Hirschbiegle’s recreation of Hitler’s famous last stand seems absent from this alien account. It’s disheartening, but the film, which gives an ingenious look at two Palestinians who have been chosen to carry out a suicide bombing mission in retaliation to an Israeli attack, will fall short of captivating detached Western audiences.

The Israeli-born Palestinian Abu-Assad co-wrote the adept script that performs a literal balancing act between those fighting violently against the Israeli occupation and those Palestinians who voice a non-violent resistance. The film won at the Berlin Film Festival and has been heralded in continents abroad, but just in the last four years the United States has felt the shockwaves of the conflict in the Middle East.

The film focuses rather exclusively on two childhood friends, Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman), as they are followed over a two-day preparation for their mission. But the brothers are first met in a comedic back and forth with a local customer at the car repair shop where they work.

Said is the unassuming version of his flamboyant counterpart, and his penetrating stare is often the focus of the lens. Lurking behind those dark eyes is humiliation and resentment over a father who was executed for being a collaborator to the Israeli occupation when Said was 10.

From their videotaped confessionals to the minute rituals performed before setting out — shaving their entire body, an ornate supper, the strapping on of the explosives — the normality of the acts is almost haunting.

Jamal (Amer Hlehel) and Abu-Karem (Ashraf Barhoun), local leaders of the resistance, are archetypal terrorists — men that are robotic in their morbid pursuit of equality.

Since 9/11, the image of a terrorist has been fashioned after insensitive beings who march in unison to the destruction of humanity, but Said and Khaled give face to the silhouette of a suicide bomber. Abu-Assad inserts episodic events and nuances of the culture for a relief from the heavy subject matter, using several bits of dialogue about the West Bank’s rumored sterilizing water as a sort of side joke.

But the slivers of humor and beautiful scenery existing in the windows of every car ride become an afterthought as Said and Khaled question “what happens” when their bombs are detonated — even with Jamal assuring them that “two angels will come to pick them up,” each man waivers as to the legitimacy of his task and its effects.

A voice of reason does exist in the form of Said’s love interest Suha (Lubra Azabal), who he meets at the auto-repair shop.

Suha is the daughter of a revered Palestinian martyr but has no part of the violent resistance her father backed, and her poetic monologues, which question Palestinian methods of resistance, make up the final hours leading up to the overwhelming climax — the final scene might be the most powerful of this movie season.

I felt ignorant leaving the theater. What were common occurrences to Said and Khaled were completely foreign to me, and current headlines remain an eerie reminder of that fact.

Learn about the conflict; read about it. And go see the film — now.

Grade: A