Over the years I have stacked a good deal of "quality" movies, mainly on DVD. Many of them have just sat on the shelf waiting for me to put them on, and often I have no clue what they are about and I let it stay that way. That was the case with "Divine Intervention" by palestinian director Elia Suleiman.
There is just something attractive going into a movie with absolutely no insight at all, but at times it can be a bit of a problem. In this case it took some time before I realised that it did not follow any conventional plot structure. And to be honest it was a bit of a relief since it did not make much sense at all. I would honestly categorise this as a surrealist movie or at least drawing heavily on some of the structured weirdness of Dali and Bunuel of the early 30´s.
The first scene deals with the murder of father Christmas. He is running away from some angry kids, and even if he throws presents at them they won´t be stopped. He ends up with a knife in his chest. That is one way to celebrate christmas, though I don´t think that is the point, since it supposedly happens in Nazereth, the birthplace of baby Jesus.
So what could that possibly mean? Is it divine intervention? Have everyone lost sight of what everything really is about. A fake Santa in a stupid costume, is not really what "faith" and "belief" is about is it? I am not a religious person, but I can identify with the critique of the inflation of the whole idea, clad in stupid costumes and Christmas present race.
This serves as an analogy for starting to think about, how distorted the "normalised" view of actions and routines are. Not least those that are involved in keeping palestinians and israelis apart. When you start to think a bit like existentialist philosopher Jean Paul Sartre, actions that you consider normal everyday behaviours, might suddenly seem very weird and ridiculous, if you step back a bit.
At the same time, looking at certain actions in a different way give you the idea that they are more like rituals than discrete actions. Take the scene where a checkpoint guard is controlling the trespassers, but doing it rather like it is a show or he is performing. The point is that the behavior as such, is not that much different but the meaning of it is worlds apart.
Or take the scene of the man waiting at a busstop and another man comes out of a door to tell him, that no busses are coming, and the waiting man answers that he knows. It looks identical to a situation where a man actually can take a bus, but the meaning of it is completely turned on its head.
This play with the viewers notion of normality versus actions and their meaning was a very interesting aspect of this movie. But it is not exactly carried completely through. There are more style choreographed and directly symbolic/surrealistic scenes like the firing squad that is having trouble with a "super"-woman, who ends up with a glorie of bullets, like a female messiah.
There is a freshness and sarcastic distancing to everything here. Some scenes repeat several times and then end in some kind of conflict or argument, or act of violence. Still it seems to me the red thread is the appeal to step back a bit and look at what is going on with "different" eyes. What is considered normal, could possibly be very problematic or evil, while other kinds of actions that are not accepted could be healthy and wise.
But despite its lightness, it is a challenging movie to get into. And I am pretty confident that most of it serves as a kind of surrealist bombardment rather than specific meanings to support the underlying thread. In any case, it certainly made me think, not so much about the conflict that is also a central aspect of the movie, but the more philosophical ideas of actions and their meaning as described above.
This is a tough one to give a verdict. I am certainly on the positive side, but it is at times hard to figure out what to make sense of and what not. But again it is the whole idea, so I am mixed up. I will settle at very recommended as I am a fan of surrealism and there are not that many of those kinds of movies around. It is one to watch and probably at least twice for those underlying ideas to sink in.
8/10
