Wajib - L'invitation au mariage

Well worth watching to normalise your view about Palestine and what life is like for Palestinian people when they are not at war with Israelis, which is what the news seems to focus upon in the main.

It operates on various levels and is well put together. Another good movie to undo the stereo-typing that tends to afflict the reporting of communities and countries around the world.

After hearing about the movie, I finally watched it... But it was so painful to watch because it reached the point of becoming boring. The idea is good, but the story and treatment were unsuccessful. The movie's pace is so slow it contributes to boring the spectator. And the ending leaves us hanging on. And frankly I wanted more...

Humorous drama is the most novel weapon of the war-torn communities. Instead of in-your-face depiction of sufferings and tragedies which leads to a quick rise-and-fall of emotional reaction (sigh, tsk tsk, and go on as before), humorous drama tackles, tickles, and trigger the thoughts of its audience. "Et maintenant on va où?" by Nadine Labaki was a very very successful one in this sense. Now another female director from another Arabian country raises the bar as high.

Firstly, the invitation delivery is technically a very good idea to take the audience to a tour among the portraits from the Christian Arab population of Palestine. This way, while cutting every scene short and painless enough to keep the viwever attentive, the sense of continuity doesn't get disrupted as if watching a talking-heads documentary.

But what is more important is the content. There are two main characters, the father and the son. We see the father telling lies (doesn't matter white or not) to comfort fellow citizens, or compromising with the occupants etc. On the other hand the son is unbending in his political and even asthetical standards. But, as time passes by, we understand how hard is the father's struggle to unite his "family" (read as his "nation") again back in Palestine. All his flaws are actually developed to achieve this aim. And yes, his son's discourse is flawless, because he enjoys being free from the hardships of the everyday life in Palestine and has no concerns about the reunion of the Palestenians in the fatherland.

So apparently the father represents the practical, real Palestine whereas the son represents the ideal. But the clash of these two is not at all theatrical, nor didactical. The dialogues are so real that in the end the viewer does not feel herself "injected" by the director's ideas, she just starts to rethink about and compare her ideals and practices.

This is a movie that just drags on and on, uses a lot of improvised dialog and has a silly ending. It was a total waste of time, even for someone who is very familiar with the culture of the region. Must have been produced as some kind of tax break venture.

I have been looking for this for so long, but it was so worth it. Did not disappoint, on the contrary, it delivered in spades. So many cultural aspects that I was not aware of. Ethnical Palestinians living in Israel and the struggles they face. It's a great family drama and it delivers abundantly on that front, but it's also very political, and politics is the bone of contention between Shadi and his father. It's easy to be political and uncompromising when you're living far away. The confrontation between them at the end is so poignant and effective in delivering this. His dad had to live and keep them alive, he couldn't afford grand ideas of the motherland. That is for the Palestinian diaspora. At some point he was speaking about West-Bankers as others. And he probably perceives them as very removed from his life in Nazareth. There's also mention of Daesh and that gave me the shivers.

What also shocked me was that the Palestinian women living here are very liberated compared to those in Arab-speaking countries. They wear normal clothes, even tight and revealing ones, are sexual beings and have professions. The only downside is if you're known to have lived with a man, unmarried. Then you are out of the marriage market for good.

Living in Italy, it makes perfect sense to me that Shadi would be wearing red trousers and a pink shirt. Of course he does.

The great thing about this movie is that you come to sympathize with every character, despite their differing opinions. Even the absent mother.