Humanizing terrorism

[Behind the Aegis]

The Golden Globe award for best foreign film went Monday to Paradise Now, an entry from "Palestine" about two suicide bombers. Though no independent entity called Palestine yet exists, Nazareth-born, Dutch-resident director Hany Abu-Assad's French-German-Dutch-Israeli co-production has already garnered a plethora of awards, including the Audience Prize and Best Film Award at the Berlin Film Festival, as well as the European Oscar last December.

The latter prize was conferred on the day a Palestinian suicide bomber detonated himself at a Netanya mall, taking six innocent lives and maiming numerous others.

The film details the painstaking preparations of two attractive young friends with whom it is not difficult to sympathize. They feel suffocated in Nablus: Sa'id, the younger, prefers "death to inferiority," while his love-interest Suha - the foreign-born daughter of "an assassinated Palestinian hero" - tries relentlessly but ultimately fails to dissuade Sa'id from showing the "courage of his convictions."

The friends set out with explosive charges around their midriffs, are separated at the security barrier when surprised by an IDF patrol, and later reunite. The tearjerker moments revolve not around the presumed fate of the passengers - mostly young soldiers - on the Israeli civilian bus ultimately boarded by Sa'id, but around his friend's failure, following a last-minute change of heart, to dissuade him from going ahead with the bombing.

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[Andromeda]

1. It reminds me of "Munich"

in a way. Different stories but each one illustrates a moral dilemma. The Mossad agent, weary of killing, leaves Israel and moves to Boston. His dilemma was that he saw the Palestinians as human beings and that dampened his lust for revenge, whether or not it had any merit was left up to the viewer. I guess some people have different takes on who the real victims were.

It was supposedly based on real events but movie makers never stick to actual facts but instead "Hollwoodize" the story by adding some things and leaving others out. They just want to make money and that's the bottom line.

In "Paradise Now" we have the same thing except there are two actors. As in "Munich" the victims are only incidental to the story and that's unfortunate. The film was only about the points-of-view of the protagonists and the dilemma they faced when deciding whether they should sacrifice their own lives because they didn't feel important enough. In a culture that glorifies death I would think seeing a film like this would discourage young people from blowing themselves up.

Sometimes I wonder what passes for entertainment nowadays.