Sunday Review: The Attack

A perfect life deconstructed

By Morris Dean

Spellbound last weekend, my wife and I watched The Attack (2012, written & directed by Ziad Doueiri), a film in Hebrew & Arabic with English subtitles.
    "It was a perfect life until a single moment changed everything," as a text-over in the trailer says. Dr. Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman) is a Palestinian medical doctor successfully assimilated into Israeli society and practicing eminently in Tel Aviv.
    The "perfect life" includes not only the doctor's successful assimilation (an opening scene shows him receiving a distinguished award from his admiring medical colleagues – the first conferred on a Palestinian), but also his idyllic marriage to a good and beautiful woman (Siham, played by Reymond Amsalem), also a Palestinian.
    And the "moment" refers to a distant explosion the day following the award, heard from the veranda of the hospital where Dr. Suliman works. They soon learn it was a suicide-bombing in a crowded cafe. Injured people and dead bodies start to arrive. During a break, he can tell that the covered corpse that rides the elevator with him is absent pelvis and legs. Only later is he woken from sleep at home to come down to the hospital, they have a problem. When he arrives, he is told they have a body they think may be his wife's...No, no, she's out of town, visiting family....

    Indeed, she was supposed to be visiting family. She hadn't even attended the award ceremony. When she telephoned to his cell-phone, he was about to be called up to the podium; he told her he couldn't talk then, he'd have to phone back. But he never reached her....
    The mystery presented by his wife's presence in the cafe motivates the action of the film, as Dr. Jaafari lengthily denies his wife could have been involved with Palestinian terrorists ...before accepting that she must have been...somehow.

    What he discovers isn't simply a yes-or-no answer and a literal reconstruction of what happened, but some comprehension of the profound gulf that separates the views of Palestinians and Israelis over whose land they inhabit, over justice, even over who has a right to live.
    I think we in the West have some sense of that gulf from decades of news stories and accounts. What got me from seeing it portrayed in this movie was the realization that something like the gulf has come to exist in U.S. politics – not that I understand it any better now, but only realize it may be worse than I had thought.
    At any rate, it's a taut, engrossing film, with overtones we can hear and appreciate. It doesn't take sides politically with either Palestinians or Israelis but stays focused on the dilemma of a man we have no difficulty identifying with.

We watched on DVD borrowed from our local public library. Trailer here.
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Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean

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