DUBAI: Stylistically, “Divine Intervention” might be painted in distinctly international art-house hues, but it’s a movie that could only have been made in Palestine.
Upon its release in 2002, its bristling brand of black comedy was recognized with serious cinema’s greatest honors: a Palme d’Or nomination – and Jury Prize win – at the Cannes Film Festival. But when Hollywood’s awards season rolled around later that year, the film’s beguiling Kafkaesque roadblocks came off the screen and onto the ballot form, with Oscar judges reportedly ruling the first entry from the then-unrecognized state as ineligible.
This sorry tale alone might have secured a certain notoriety, but cannot alone explain the canonical renown of director/star Elia Suleiman’s best-known picture. When in 2013 the Dubai International Film Festival polled nearly 500 film critics, writers and scholars to compile a definitive list of the 100 most important Arabic-language films ever made, “Divine Intervention” was the only movie from this century to make the top 10 – and one of only three post-2000 entries in the top 30 (the third of which was Suleiman’s 2009 picture “The Time That Remains.”)
Tellingly, today “Divine Intervention” is among just a handful of the anointed list’s entries readily available on DVD with English subtitles. It’s a largely plotless, absurdist portrait of life under occupation in his native Nazareth, and Suleiman’s studious cinematic referencing and ironic wit feel tailor-made for the liberal international intelligentsia.
Like a tone poem or meditative montage, bleakly comic set pieces unfold with stoic detachment: A villager lines up glass bottles ready to throw at police. Santa Claus is stabbed to death. Thwarted lovers meet to furtively hold hands at a border checkpoint. A female Arab ninja takes down a crew of gun-toting commandos.
Comparisons abound to Jacques Tati and Jim Jarmusch and, like the latter, Suleiman has a keen sense of juxtaposing incongruous images with existing music – the soundtrack of “Divine Intervention” namechecks Arab talents from vintage legend Mohammed Abdel Wahab to contemporary superstar Amr Diab and indie heroes Soapkills.
Dialogue is in short supply: Suleiman’s character ES – surely a nod to Kafka’s K – utters not a single line. Instead, his actions speak loudest when releasing a helium balloon bearing Yasser Arafat’s face to float over Jerusalem – which dumbstruck Israeli soldiers farcically debate shooting down.
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