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To
Begin at the Beginning
Type:
Drama, 278 min.
Director:
Yousry Nasrallah
Language: Arabic with English subtitles
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Bab al-Shams film
poster |
Bab
Al-Shams (The Gate of
the Sun), Yousry Nasrallah's magical and realistic retelling of the story of
Palestinians, which had its Cairo premiere on January 12, has generated a hubbub
in the cultural sphere. Amina Elbendary talks to the director after reading the
book and sneaking a coveted preview, while Mohamed El-Assyouti, fresh from a
press screening, explores the theory behind this brand of history making.
The
Novel
In
the beginning, there was a novel—a good thick novel. Elias Khoury's Bab
Al-Shams came out in 1998 to all kinds of acclaim. And Yousry Nasrallah,
filmmaker and friend of Khoury's, loved it. An ambitious book, Bab Al-Shams
left Nasrallah wishing he could shoot some of the situations Khoury conceived.
It offered a very human account of Palestinians, but one that was panoramic in
its scope, packed with narratives and counter-narratives, various perspectives
on the same reality, yet with a level-headed focus on a handful of very
recognizably human lives.
However,
good novels often make bad films. The mistake filmmakers make with a good novel,
Nasrallah tells me on a rainy evening in his warm Zamalek home, is that “they
kneel, they bow; they are crushed by it.” For him, it was a matter of living Bab
Al-Shams, integrating it into “one’s sensual makeup;” and, he was not
about to be crushed. But, who would produce a film about Palestine? Not
foreigners, he thought. Yet the French satellite channel ARTE thought to propose
a family saga on Palestinians in January 2001, as part of a larger project that
included the Balkans and Algeria. Nasrallah, wary at first, finally agreed on
condition that it was an adaptation of Bab Al-Shams and that Khoury
collaborate on the script.
One
striking feature of the novel is its play on the “Thousand and One Nights”
structure. Like the formative text, Bab Al-Shams has a frame story told
by the protagonist Khalil (Bassel Khayatt), out of which dozens of stories and
characters emerge. And like Scheherazade, Khalil narrates for his older friend
Younis (Orwan Nyrabieh), a father figure who lies dying in his hospital bed, in
order to preserve life.
It
is the men who narrate in Bab Al-Shams. Khalil begins by retelling
Younis's life, then Younis narrates, then Khalil tells of his own life. And what
is told is the story of Palestine; simultaneously lived and imagined. The
retelling is a form of rewriting history, based on the real enough material of
oral and written histories compiled over decades. The “Thousand and One
Nights” effect is something Nasrallah tried to keep in the script, he tells
me, as he collaborated with Khoury and Lebanese filmmaker Mohamed Soueid, both
friends since 1978 when he was living in Beirut. Conceived as a film in two
parts—“The Departure” and “The Return”—it incorporates the two frame
stories of the novel, Younis's and Khalil's.
Interdependent,
the two parts were nonetheless conceived as separate. And Nasrallah passionately
recounts how he opposed cutting part two to focus on the 1930s and 1940s. That
it be told from the point of view of the present, the point of view of someone
like Khalil (or Nasrallah), who never experienced Palestine first hand but
through the prism of the refugee camps in Lebanon, and to the backdrop of the
Lebanese Civil War, was essential to the story.
“Besides,
you cannot tell a story unless you have a story of your own, right? What is your
relationship with the founding narrative? How does one see one’s self and
one’s history as an individual?” The story of Khalil and Shams legitimizes
the story of Younis and Nahila.
Read
in this review:
Part
I: The Exodus
Part
I: The Departure—or the Exodus—revolves around Younis and his marriage to
Nahila (Reem Turki), whom he leaves behind to join the resistance, returning
periodically to meet her, in secret, at the cave of Bab Al-Shams. It is a
narrative about the genesis of the Palestinian predicament, incorporating those
narratives of the 1948 Nakbah that Arabs accept, while at the same time,
questioning them and offering a distinct point of view—that of Palestinian
peasants. Younis, his parents (Hiam Abbas and Mohtasseb Aref), Nahila, Om Hassan
the midwife (Nadira Omran), their relatives and neighbors are all peasants; they
are individuals on their own, abandoned in the face of overwhelming power.
References
to notables are scant; political leaders appear merely as portraits on the walls
of security offices. One dominant Israeli narrative that resurfaces in Arab
circles holds that Palestinians sold their land or were encouraged to do so by
Arab leaders. And the beauty of Bab Al-Shams is how it circumvents this
argument, for it is not about landowners, but peasants who choose life over
death. They have no refuge, no support. While the novel makes some room for the
landowners, the film mentions them only in passing. The Arab Army appears
briefly, only to expose and ridicule itself. In a beautiful, idyllic scene, the
families of Ein Al-Zaytun are collecting the olive harvest when suddenly the
Israeli armed forces appear, forcing them to flee for their lives.
Yet
the film is all too conscious of such idyllic constructions. As we see in young
Younis's relations with his parents, not all was perfect before the Nakbah.
Discrimination against women is discussed in reference to girls’ access to
education, a right Nahila strives for. A passing reference is made to the
landowner’s illicit, abusive relationship with Nahila’s mother and her
sisters. At school, when the teacher asks the children, “What is our
country?” they consistently reply, “Ein Al-Zaytun,” unable to imagine a
nation beyond. Even in its idyllic scenes, the film questions that blissful
founding myth.
“But
it does so without cynicism,” Nasrallah insists. “Though we know it can only
taste like water,” he goes on, the film allows for empathy with Om Hassan when
she states that the water in her old village home tastes like honey. The exodus
scenes are real, even as they remain epical: families caught between burnt out
homes and unforgiving neighbors. Nasrallah was keen not to use documentary
footage, or footage that could metamorphose into documentary, he says that every
scene should include his characters, for the film is about individuals, not
nameless peasants. Palestinians may disagree with the way the exodus was
depicted, he says, but he hopes that such contention will empower the diaspora
to reveal narratives shrouded in shame. Similarly, in his attempt to relive
Younis's life, Khalil strives to recapture an image of the father he lost as a
child, searching for his own genesis, his individual history. He is obsessed by
the drive to bring his father to life (or keep Younis alive) by narration.
A
Story of Love or Struggle?
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Nahila
(Reem Turki) and Younis (Orwan Nyrabieh) at the cave of Bab Al-Shams,
magical encounters that take place against the odds, investing the first
part of the film with unsuspected romance |
But
is Younis's story—the story of that generation of Palestinians—one of love
or struggle? Echoing the novel, the film makes room for both versions: a magical
tale of lovers meeting at the cave, recounted by Khalil, and a realistic one of
fighting—brief glimpses of which are allowed in the film—told by Om Hassan.
Both concur when every time he is defeated, Younis stamps and announces Minel
awwal (from the beginning) and both the struggle and the narrative start
over.
It
is in the second part of the film that Khalil’s own story emerges: his search
for his mother, from whom he was separated as a child, in Amman; and his
problematic love affair with Shams (Hala Omran). Shams turns out to be in love
with another man whom she kills for refusing to marry her, only to be lured into
his family’s camp and is brutally murdered. Shot to the music of Tamer
Karawan, with the Egyptian singer Zein performing the lyrics of Al-Akhtar
Al-Saghir, the murder scene is as epical as the exodus of part one. Only at the
end does Khalil let go of Younis.
Throughout
both parts, Nasrallah questions the notion of the hero—something that the
casting of the chubby Orwa Nyrabieh in the role of Younis reflects. Equally
subversive is the fact that narration is undertaken by men, the heroism left to
women like Nahila and Shams, who struggle to live as they imagine life should
be, in defiance of convention and reality—and they come out on top, somehow.
Nahila and the parents end up living in Palestine, where she gives birth to and
brings up half a dozen children; while Younis and many young militants become
refugees in Lebanon. Shams could be seen as a whore, but she heroically rebels
against an abusive husband and dies refusing to be abandoned. Khalil could be
seen as a cuckold, but there is more to his love for Shams. In an axial scene,
he is being questioned by an interrogator (Bassem Samra) about his role in the
murder of Shams’s other lover, and humiliating details of his life are brought
up to suggest incrimination. But he too, improbably, refuses to be crushed. As
Nasrallah puts it, he becomes an individual who can love and therefore return,
“This is not about victims.”
Nasrallah
concedes that yes, he does identify with Khalil. Like him, he knew Palestine via
Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s; and the whole second part of the film, without
which the first part loses its force, is his generation's take on the Nakbah.
The filmmaker has an axe to grind vis-à-vis Younis's generation too; whether
political leaders or famous filmmakers of the 1950s, the relation, he says, is
“ambivalent.” Thus, the film is equally a statement about the ability of the
filmmakers’ generation to champion its own form of heroism, “by telling the
story, owning our history and our memory”—heroism as narration. Reflecting
this dynamic, the two parts of the film, though formally connected to each
other, remain in sharp contrast, both in the kind of narrative they put forth
and in cinematic style—“they complete and clash with each other.” Many
Arab viewers prefer the first part, Nasrallah remarks, they find it comforting,
easy somehow, “it caresses them,” whereas the second part is rough, modern,
shocking, more like Nasrallah.
One
positive aspect of the film is how fleshed out it is in human terms.
Nasrallah’s “most sensual” film to date, according to his own testimony,
in which fascination with the human body finds expression away from any Arab
context, including the “super mediocre” discourse of Egyptian cinema, in a
kind of cinematic counterpoint to Bab Al-Shams. This liberation from
inhibition—the ability to shoot a 20-minute close up of a monologue of one
actress, for example—was aided by a cast of courageous actors. “I never did
that before because I was simply too scared,” he says. But now that he has
done it, he doubts he will be able to hold back in the future. “It would be
difficult to accept half-said things again, having tasted freedom. I
can't keep my self-respect if I compromise on that.”
An
Unconventional Production
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The exodus of the Ein Al-Zaytun
villagers |
The
release is likely to disorient, to shock. There is something very raw about the
film. Both parts open colorfully, in brightly lit surroundings, with Younis and
Khalil peeling, and ravishing, oranges; Om Hassan has brought back a fruit-laden
branch from the orchard of her old house in Palestine. Palestine is there to be
eaten, not revered like an icon on the wall. One’s national history should be
part of one’s body, one’s physical sense of self. The sensuality is helped
further by Nahed Nasrallah's simple but brilliant costumes and Adel
El-Maghrabi’s sets. In one carnivalesque scene, the peasants return to their
abandoned village to find their clothes piled up, sorted by color; they throw
them orgiastically into the air, choosing what they will—their collective
property. At this moment, roles are reversed and boundaries come down. The
clothes are a throwback to idyll: where they were part of everyday life before
becoming “folkloric” as they are now. In the exodus scenes, the actors are
literally dressed in rags, emphasizing the calamity that faced the characters.
All is beautifully wrapped up in Karawan's music.
Shot
in Syria and Lebanon, with a multi-Arab cast and crew—from Syria, Hala Omran,
Orwa Nyrabieh, Bassel Khayyatt; Tunisia, Reem Turki; Lebanon, Hanan Haj Ali; and
Egypt, Bassem Samra and Maher Essam; as well as the Palestinians Nadira Omran,
Mohtasseb Aref, and Hiam Abbas, who coached all the actors in the Palestinian
dialect—the film is an affirmative pan-Arab gesture. Although Nasrallah tried
to cast more Palestinians, many living under occupation and with Israeli
passports would not have been allowed on location.
Part
two also features French actress Beatrice Dalle in the role of the French
actress Catherine, who visits the refugee camps in the course of the action.
Nasrallah wanted a total misfit, “an alien in high heels,” a
“super-star,” no leftist sympathizer with the Palestinian cause, if only to
drive home the irony of one telling scene in which Catherine is more
understanding of Khalil’s predicament than a Lebanese bartender who rejects
everything Palestinian. By letting Khalil use her mobile phone to call his
mother, Catherine unknowingly drives the narrative to its conclusion, bringing
the search that dominates part two to a close. But, not until he has a
hallucinatory dream in which both Nahila and Shams appear as a single ghostly
figure, does Khalil stop narrating and let Younis die. Nasrallah explains how it
was necessary to rework parts of the novel to arrive at this end. It is as if
the two women work together to free both men of their bond, releasing them and
effecting a long-in-the-coming culmination.
The
two-part film promises to be a classic of Arab and international cinema. Perhaps
unintentionally, Bab Al-Shams is a collective Arab project about the
Palestinian predicament at a time when the Palestinian cause—long the focus of
Arab discourse—is being stripped of its Arab dimension and its grand
meta-historical significance. Yet Nasrallah downplays the enormity of the
project. It was hard work, he concedes, but there was a lot of magic and fun.
“It was not as overwhelming or overpowering as it seems,” he tells me, very
matter-of-factly.
Bab
Al-Shams proves it is
possible to produce an ambitious, delicate film with the budget of a well-funded
commercial Egyptian feature. This is all the more significant in that it
coincides with developments in the Palestinian and Arab art scene that place
more emphasis on individuals, their relation to history and to a larger context
that threatens to crush them. Such themes have preoccupied Nasrallah in his
previous films, from Sariqat Sayfiya (Summer Thefts) to Subian wa
Banat (Boys and Girls) to Al-Madina (The City). The transformation of
Palestinians from the object of a grand narrative to individual subjects is the
culmination of a project begun by Palestinian filmmakers like Elia Suleiman,
Nizar Hassan, and Tawfiq Abu Wael, Nasrallah suggests. “They were the ones who
did that,” he insists, “which is why we can now talk about Palestinians, not
from the perspective of a qadiya (cause).”
Improbably
yet convincingly, the film ends on an optimistic note. Khalil, child of the
camps, now freed from the yoke of his father, decides to return. He just walks
back. Nahila leaves a letter with instructions to her grandsons to seal off the
cave of Bab Al-Shams. It is a space that has been reclaimed, sacred ground that
has not been violated by occupation—a space of love, magic and fertility.
Likewise, the film is a space for memories that Khoury and Nasrallah have opened
up for contemporary generations—Palestinians and Arabs alike: a space waiting
to be reclaimed and re-narrated—from the beginning.
For
the Love of Resistance
One
relatively easy way to label Bab Al-Shams is to describe it as an
audiovisual account of the Palestinian struggle from 1943 to 1994. The film
begins on the eve of the Oslo Accords, with Younis, an old fedayi or
freedom fighter, in a coma, and Khalil, his adopted son, reminding Younis of his
life story while he nurses him, thus setting off an engaging string of
narratives that speak of resistance and love.
Based
on an eponymous novel by Elias Koury (the script was produced by filmmaker
Yousry Nasrallah in collaboration with Khoury and Mohamed Soueid), the
278-minute-long feature is not so readily defined. Such an interpretation,
indeed, would be reductive, for it overlooks, among many other things, an
essential aspect of the endeavor: Nasrallah's insistence, shared by his
protagonist Khalil, that neither description nor metaphor is an adequate way to
tell the tale at hand. “Description is forgetfulness,” Khalil declaims,
“and I don't want to forget.” Nasrallah resorts instead to non-chronological
narration: he fragments the temporal unity of the “history” he deals with,
groping for as immediate an experience of its human dimension as possible. Such
a strategy may also be necessary, given the enormous magnitude of the subject
and reflected in the film’s unusual length.
Yet
Nasrallah still employs temporal frameworks, if only to suggest structure, or
rather to reflect the inner scheme of the work’s conception: a
disproportionate, fecund duality. The first episode is formally framed in the
period 1943-48, the year of the Nakbah; the second spans the Lebanese Civil War
and extends all the way to Oslo. There is, in the progression, a kind of schism,
a two-sided wrangle in which present and past engage in dynamic
dialectics—something reflected in, though perhaps secondary to.
The
first of these concerns Younis and Nahila, whose connection with the homeland is
still earthy and organic: they revel as much in local food and drink as in their
own libido—to which their offspring testify. They embody a collective myth of
counter-occupation idyll, where life in the homeland was still possible, despite
persecution and injustice.
The
second, between Khalil and Shams, seems doomed, precisely because of its
remoteness from the homeland. Following Shams's murder and Younis's death—when
Khalil is visited by a phantasmagoric messenger, a hybrid version of both Nahila
and Shams—the viewer feels that the umbilical chord connecting the young man
to his people has not been severed by distance. His return to the homeland is as
natural, as effortlessly meaningful, as the flow of a stream or the growth of an
olive grove. Such is the human will to dream, Nasrallah seems to be saying, to
imagine a better future, and that nothing stands in its way.
But
such is not a collective will, not in any straightforward way. A character in
the film remarks that, while Palestine is the cause of all Arabs, no Arab wants
to deal with Palestinians. Nasrallah attempts to address this failure by
presenting individual characters, circumventing both official and media
positions on the cause. In a Cahiers du cinema review, Mia Hansen-Løve
describes how Nasrallah, much like Khoury in the novel, manages to place himself
on the borderline of collective and individual narratives. The characters, she
says, represent not Palestine but their personal destinies. This is integral to
any understanding of what Nasrallah set out to achieve, he speaks of
individuals.
In
opposition to the kind of sensational cinema epitomized in the
pseudo-documentary style of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993), Bab
Al-Shams questions the veracity of even documentary footage. Although the
second part of the film, “The Return,” opens with a scene shot with a
hand-held video camera operated by Om Hassan’s nephew, who is filming her 1983
visit to her former house in Galilee, thus setting the magic realism of the
first part in relief—a space molded by the will of the allegedly impartial
journalist, if not the subjectively motivated filmmaker. In a more graphic
duplication of atrocities, the shock value would have detracted from the memory
of tragedy. And in this sense, Nasrallah’s film belongs in the tradition of
Alain Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), in which the closest one gets
to understanding the calamity is sharing a personal memory of it.
It
as much out of artistic preference as budget shortages that Nasrallah forgoes
mimetic dramatization in favor of story telling—a strategy that proves
successful as Khalil’s accounts ring a truer note. The film focuses on the
twists and turns of the characters’ lives, with the rest of Palestine
furnishing an undifferentiated backdrop—a quality reinforced visually by the
use of selective focus.
Yet
despite Nasrallah's aversion to symbolism, his tale of Palestinians often
assumes mythological proportions of Biblical import. Palestinians are like early
Christians fleeing from Roman wrath, dwelling in caves, preserving their sense
of identity against all odds. Nahila is an androgynous adolescent, 12 years old,
a virgin for the first five years of her marriage to Younis. Abruptly, she turns
into a kind of Jean D'Arc, urging her people to return to their land, drive away
the invaders, and take what is rightfully theirs. Finally, she becomes a
matriarch, challenging the Israeli authorities. She is both Mary Magdalene and
the Mary the Virgin, a remarkably earthbound embodiment of Palestinian female
energy in all its forms. Yet here again it is individual women who play out the
story.
According
to Khoury, who spent seven years interviewing refugees, men like Younis lack an
effective organ of love, while the whole of the woman’s body constitutes such
an organ. Women, he believes, hold the repositories of memory, with Nahila and
Shams—the one bearing children, the other leaving behind a widower—acting as
incarnations of Scheherazade and challenging patriarchal power by confronting
Younis and Khalil with their inability to get the story straight. The notion is
found in pre- Islamic poetry: Imru’ Al-Qais comparing the beloved’s breast
to a mirror in which to see the world. As Shams points out in criticizing the
autoerotic connotations of making love in the mirror, the male version of the
story is always solipsistic; the female, by contrast, is organic and fecund.
Intercutting two versions of Nahila reading her last letter—in one she
addresses Younis, in the other she looks straight at the camera lens—Nasrallah
plays out this difference, stressing duality further.
There
exists yet another cue for disentangling the complex fabric of the narrative.
Khalil, the film's narrator, is like Telemachus, unraveling his way through a
web of oral tradition, and asking, in effect, whether Younis, a comatose
Odysseus, is really a hero or a reactionary patriarch disguised as a freedom
fighter. And Younis's exotic encounters with Nahila (the Penelope of this
arrangement), after he fled the homeland and she stayed on, were they real or
imagined? How could displaced villagers find enough food to survive? Perhaps the
whole point of the film is to divest any answers to these questions of
relevance.
*This
article was originally published in the Al-Ahram Weekly in the week of 13 - 19
January 2005: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2005/725/cu4.htm
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