For example: Omar falls in love with the daughter of Anan, his Christian employer.
Copti and Shani are alert to the ways good intentions can produce catastrophe in a land where too many people lack control of their lives and where the option of violence is accorded too much honor. Writer-directors Scandar Copti, an Arab, and Yaron Shani, a Jew, despise none of their characters and let none of them off the hook.
#CLANDESTINY CLUB MOVIE#
The strength of this movie lies in its harsh fairness. Meanwhile, Dando, after failing to persuade his distraught father to resume his role as patriarch, realizes that he will have to be the head of the family now, and that this new role will require him to exact some sort of vengeance if his brother has been killed. When Omar’s mother urges him to flee the Bedouin, he tells her that a man does not run or let the fear of death rule his life. And of course both men’s troubles are aggravated by the political friction between Arabs and Jews.īut there is something else that gnaws at both Omar and Dando: machismo or, as they perceive it, honor.
We quickly realize that the car-park incident hasn’t occurred yet, and that Omar’s financial desperation and Dando’s anger are leading both families down a terrible road. Dando is a policeman, and he takes his family’s anxieties out on the Arabs he has to deal with on his daily rounds. Just as the Arab brothers worry about their mother’s health, the Jewish family’s older son, Dando from the car park, is concerned about his father’s mental well-being, which has been shattered by the disappearance of one of his sons. Who exactly are these Jews, whose leader is called Dando?Īt this point, the moviemakers (in a narrative strategy similar to the one used in the American film Crash) deliberately jolt us by dropping Omar’s storyline and turning to the situation of a Jewish family, one of whose sons, a soldier, has disappeared. But, since the pay is low, Omar resorts to petty larcenies and, eventually, to a drug deal that leads to a catastrophic encounter with some Jewish men in a car park. (Ajami is a neighborhood in Jaffa.) Here Omar and Malek can work for a family friend, the bar owner Anan, a Christian Arab. But how is Omar’s impoverished family to pay, especially when the mother falls ill and needs expensive medical treatment? Her three sons move to the old port town of Jaffa, close to the splendid new city Tel Aviv. Is the law called in? Of course not, for this is an intertribal matter that can be mediated by a well-meaning Muslim cleric who adjusts the blood debt to one payable in shekels. The right blood hasn’t been spilled yet, so either Omar or his uncle must die. Once they realize their mistake, do the Bedouins repent or desist? Not at all. But his uncle had recently shot and crippled a thug who was trying to extort money from him, and the thug’s Bedouin relatives, seeking revenge but temporarily unable to kill the uncle, settled for his nephew. The child had offended nobody but had been mistaken for Omar. In Ajami’s first scene, an assassin on a motorcycle shoots down a boy repairing Omar’s car. Is this not a good thing? Isn’t family honor a better safeguard of social unity than the impersonal workings of the state? Well. But if you have offended another clan, everyone in your own is accountable. If you need help, the clan will help you. In the small town in Israel where the Arab youth Omar lives with his widowed mother and two younger brothers, Malek and Nasri, the authority of the extended family, the clan, is supreme. And surely the custom of seeking advice from elders and support from the extended family is a thing of the past.īut the Arab-Israeli film Ajami may make you wonder if lonely individualism is really such a bad thing. We detach ourselves all too soon and completely from our roots, cocooning our lives within 24/7 jobs and the sort of technology that keeps us on call for business and emergencies but not for intimacy. Social commentators lament the lonely individualism of Americans, and pinpoint the loss of community as a source of malaise.
0 kommentar(er)
