Depending on your movie and story sense, Ajami, co-directed by Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew and Scandar Copti an Israeli Arab, will be a crime story with a striations of culture and neighborhood life you have never seen, or several stories of people, Muslim, Christian and Jew, beaded on a a couple of crime stories. In either case the visual, aural and emotional impacts are substantial, and don’t let up until the titles start rolling. In fact, at my viewing several left long before the end. Interestingly, the screen violence was far less than almost any U.S. tv show, or recent movie you could mention. What wasn’t less was the growing dread as we see the intractable, seemingly fatal, noose drawing tighter and tighter.
Ajami begins with a drive by shooting. It might have been L.A., or Oakland. The victim was not the one intended, and we are drawn into the Arab culture of the impoverished neighborhood of Ajami, in the port city of Jaffa. The shooting is set up by a revenge cycle, triggered by armed resistance to a protection racket. One of the most unforgettable scenes is a neighborhood court with both parties arguing before an Arab judge who comes to a financial judgment, taking into account that one family has a cripple to deal with and the other merely a seriously wounded man — and how much is set aside for God. Mind-bending.
The intended victim, Omar, works in a restaurant owned by a Christian Arab “fixer,” Elias Saba. And at the same restaurant is a young man, Malek, who is working illegally to help a mother who needs a bone marrow transplant. Binj is an Arab Israeli, and a modern man, dabbler in dope and in love with an Israeli Jew. The main characters are rounded off with Dando, an Israeli cop whose younger brother on the way out of the Army has disappeared, likely at Arab hands.
Much of what you see will be familiar — drug deals gone awry, hopeless lovers separated by family and culture, families brawling and loving, neighborhoods teeming with people, trash, newcomers, old timers. Much will be culture jumping — the neighborhood court, the interjections calling on God in ordinary speech, Arab women dressed as in the west, others with hair covered in their own homes and kitchens. Two fine symbolic scenes show a young Arab boy washing his grandfather, pouring water over his head, and later, Dando washing his infant daughter, pouring water over her head.
With five or six stories to tell there are many players, all in Jaffa all with names unfamiliar to our ears or eyes. Complexity and some confusion sets in early. What are the relationships? Have we got the names straight? The spoken language is Arabic and Hebrew; the subtitles identify each, when needed, and so add information that both enriches and confuses. Why is the girlfriend speaking in Hebrew to her boyfriend who is arguing in Arabic to his friends? What piece is being put in place? To add to the confusion, somewhere past mid-way there is a loop-back in time which might have been better signaled. As it is, the man we have been told is dead, reappears. We wonder if we have mistaken the name, or the character. [It was after this that several audience members walked out.] It isn’t until the final chapter –as the film is divided into– that crucial scenes are re-enacted, information is added and clarity comes.
It’s a dense film, puzzling in places, with close-up violence, accidental, deliberate and intimate, all set in a neighborhood, a city and a part of the world we know to be strangling in decades of violence. It is hard to watch but worth the effort. There isn’t much to lighten the load, some coarse male-joking that seems to come with men in any culture, scenes of Arab youth rocking out, simple flirting, and young girls unafraid of their older brothers however male dominant the culture is.
One of the better movies I have seen this year, deserving it’s Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film [won by El Secreto de sus Ojos,] though perhaps a shade too long, and a fist fight too many. I can’t say the little man is standing on the arms of the chair applauding, it’s much too draining for that. But he’s got it down as a film and a story about cultures he won’t soon forget. It’s not a popcorn movie, but do see it.
The directors have told a story of Palestinians and Jews, Muslims, Arabs and Christians, wrapped into an urban tale of violence and crime that is somehow familiar. And yet in its strangeness it reminds us the story is about something much bigger. As the final subtitle tells us, a lyric to a song being sung over the dead:
Open Your Eyes.
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