This movie put me in mind of the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013. In that case, many people were surprised at reports that the surviving bomber, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, was said to be popular and personable. In this adaptation of a novel by Yasmina Khadra, a successful surgeon (Ali Suliman), an Israeli Arab whose best friends are Jews, learns that his wife was a victim of a horrific bombing. Told that she was also the suicide bomber, he cannot square that with his notion of the loving wife he knew.
Having lost both a spouse and an ordinary grieving process, he reacts first with denial and then with an effort to make some sense of what happened. His journey, in which he encounters more radicalized Palestinians, is bound to leave him unsatisfied. It left me also unsatisfied in terms of what I would have wanted to happen, but was probably realistic in terms of what might happen. A novel would perhaps have rendered it more understandable why some Palestinians would support suicide bombings; the inconveniences of checkpoints and collateral damage of anti-terrorist operations are spoken of but not seen. Nonetheless, the film capably explores what it means to live as a disfavored minority in a modern state.
IMDb link
viewed 7/10/13 7:35 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 7/10/13
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