THE WORLD is a ghetto, and all parts of the ghetto world are starting to look alike: dried-up, crumbling buildings, vacant lots full of abandoned stained sofas, idle men sitting and staring at nothing—boredom punctuated by the sudden panic of a gun ambush. Are thugs copying the movies or is it the other way around?
Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani’s Ajami shows a bad side of Tel Aviv that’s looking very familiar. The names are changed, but the problems are the same: illegal immigrants scraping by, horrible hospital bills, inexpert gunmen leaving their victims paralyzed, romance that isn’t allowed to cross ethnic boundaries.
What does Ajami bring to the table, then? The Israeli contender for the best foreign film Oscar is framed with a child’s narrative of “the worst time of my life.” The boy who says this is Nasri (Fouad Habash), who sketches the murders taking place around him in a graphic novel. The tale begins with a shooting: Nasri’s uncle plugged a Bedouin gangster who was demanding protection money. Retaliation was swift: the family business was burned, and the uncle was paralyzed by bullets. Vengeance demands more blood. Nasri’s 19-year-old brother, Omar (Shahir Kabaha), is now the family’s oldest, hiding until he can beg for help from the Christian Arab fixer Abu Elias (Youssef Sahwani), a plump, unibrowed owner of a fancy restaurant and bar. Abu Elias has a sweet daughter, Hadir (Ranin Karim), who is deeply in love with Omar. (Except for a mom and a passing-through girlfriend, Karim is the one female in the movie.)
The story spins out: Omar and his family get drastically indebted in man-gelt to the Bedouins, who want $57,000 to call off the feud. A young illegal alien comes in to work for Abu Elias, and bad times cascade. A street scuffle between a gentrifying Israeli and the boys in the ‘hood turns homicidal and brings in the police.
Binj (co-director Copti), a carefree cook with an Ed “Big Daddy” Roth beard, winds up dead, and the whole neighborhood knows that the Hebrew speakers did it. Finally, we see—or think we see—two sides of a week in the life of Dando (Eran Naim), a plainclothes cop. The multiangled, four-chaptered story is held together with mood, coincidence, terrific little anecdotes and local color. The scene about buying a gun through a low hole in a cinderblock wall is instructive. A brief moment of teasing between Omar and the pretty, ponytailed Hadir has unforced sweetness to it. The documentarylike episode in which the price of a man’s life is decided at a Bedouin gangster council is something new. The process involves much lawyering, much calling out to Allah for blessing; fortunately, He gets his cut of the money at the end of the trial.
I found it strange that the co-director gave himself the most lighthearted comic bit in the film, when Binj leads the chorus of a nonsense song from the side of the stove in Abu Elias’ restaurant. When something like this happens, you always wonder if it’s because the director didn’t feel he could trust the rest of the cast to be funny.
Where Ajami left me a little cold is in its televisionistic qualities. This darting style never gives the cast much of a chance. Sin Nombre, by contrast, had breathing room and made good use of the land around it, whereas Ajami merely looks out the window restlessly during a ride from one ghetto tio another—and borrows an idea from von Trier’s Zentropa for the last blackouts.
Ajami strives to be the bio of a entire bad neighborhood. You feel like you’ve seen something. You visit a place where the violence never stops, where gunmen shoot each other’s brothers and then lament that fate or honor forced them to do it. Yet like so many of these ghetto movies, Ajami lacks a real core. Of course, such a core would pose—or even answer—the question “What is to be done?”
There’s been debate over whether Ajami, and all Israeli films, should be boycotted in order to protest Israel’s conduct in the Gaza Strip. The Israeli encirclement of Gaza is hard-line retaliation for the kidnapping of the Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit. Shalit’s kidnapping is obviously the source of the fictional story here of what happens to Dando’s brother.
It’s never a good idea to use the Holocaust as a point of comparison for anything. As my colleague Don Hines says, that’s like being the junior-high-school kid who says the principal is worse than Hitler. Certainly, Egypt is doing its part to keep Gaza bottled up. But parallels to the Warsaw Ghetto are valid when describing a situation in which Israeli military power seals off an urban population, depriving them of essentials, leaving them to choke on their own filth. For details, see the Nov. 9, 2009, article by George Packer—nobody’s Arab tool—in The New Yorker.
Ajami itself is an open critique of the worst sectarian violence, of vengeful police and of the grinding government pressure on Palestinians. It’s hardly a Valentine to the hard work done in the peace process—or a protest that Israel is the United States’ best friend in the world, the one democracy in the Middle East, did you know women there have the vote? etc. To return to the boycott at the Toronto Film Festival, it seems a petty, even stupidly grandstanding, way to protest a country’s crimes. It’s too close to the dreaded secondary boycott, where you strike back at a vendor for selling something or other, instead of the manufacturer of that something or other. And what if everyone who was furious at America’s multiple fracturing of the Geneva Convention stopped going to the googleplex? James Cameron might be out of a job!
AJAMI (Unrated; 120 min.), directed and written by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, photographed by Boaz Yehonatan Yaacov and starring Shahir Kabaha and Youssef Sahwani, opens March 12 at Camera 3 in San Jose.
