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'Paradise Now': There are no winners

By STEVE MURRAY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

They're so nice, these older men in "Paradise Now," with their earnest, devout ways. They tell you how privileged you are to be given this mission. They tell you how to look soldiers in the eye, how to move quickly without arousing suspicion, how to pull the detonation cord only when you can score the highest possible body count among bystanders.

Why, they've even put your face on a poster that they'll have plastered all over the streets of Nablus even before your smoking body parts can be scraped up, along with those of your victims in downtown Tel Aviv.

Warner Independent Pictures

'Paradise Now'

B+

The verdict: An involving and all-too-relevant drama about terrorism.

Director: Hany Abu-Assad
Starring: Lubna Azabel, Amer Hiehel, Kais Nashef, Ali Suliman
Run time: 90 minutes
Release date: Oct. 28, 2005
Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic material and brief strong language.
Language Arabic with English subtitles

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They're so very nice, these men, you may not even stop to wonder why they keep enlisting young idealists like you to blast themselves straight to paradise — while they remain behind, among the living.

Hany Abu-Assad's powerful and all-too-timely drama about Palestinian suicide bombers puts a face — well, two faces — on the endless tensions between Israel and the West Bank, the convoluted logic of bombs, buses and the no-exit philosophy of eye-for-an-eye.

Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) are best friends and coworkers at a garage. They have shaggy beards, but they barely seem a few weeks beyond childhood. They still live at home with their mothers and younger siblings, and their world view is constrained by what community leaders and mullahs tell them.

For example, that they will be heroes for martyring themselves as suicide bombers. And that two angels will then appear to whisk them off to paradise.

"Are you sure?" one of the young men, in a rare moment of doubt, asks their recruiter/handler Jamal (Amer Hlehel). He answers, "Absolutely."

Such is the power, and peril, of faith, the movie suggests.

Khaled prepares for his last day on earth with the gusto of a kid playing with a new toy. After the explosives are strapped to his chest, he practices for his big moment, whipping around like a gunslinger, reaching for the detonation cord at his waist.

But Said's faith is tested by his feelings for a young woman named Suha (Lubna Azabal), newly returned to Nablus. She has a worldlier view than the young men. Born in France, partly raised in Morocco, she's the daughter of a Palestinian leader revered by many, now dead. (It's implied, but not clarified, that he may have been a martyr himself.) Everyone tells Suha she must be so proud of him. "I'd rather he were still alive than be proud of him," she says.

Her common-sense approach to the messy realpolitik of the West Bank is contrasted with Said and Khaled's credulity, sometimes a little too baldly. But it's a way for director Abu-Assad, who cowrote the script, to get everyone's viewpoint into the film. And just when you think you know how this will all end up, you're wrong.

The movie is driven by the characters' passionate, despairing arguments about the fine line between victimization and violence. But "Paradise Now" also has, at times, an almost surreal visual flair. Newly trimmed, shaved and outfitted in sleek suits, Said and Khaled, en route to Tel Aviv, run through olive groves and scramble up rocky berms. They look like comic wanderers out of a Samuel Beckett play. Only, there's nothing funny about this.

Azabal, veteran of many European films, nicely blends smarts and sensuality. Her two leading men have less acting experience. Nashef, in particular, has a passivity that verges on the opaque, but he doesn't seriously damage the film.

Shortly before the end, the camera meditates on the faces of all the characters, faces shadowed with fatigue and fear, with resignation and nervous anticipation of what the day will bring. That's when you realize that, in this ongoing struggle, there are no winners. All are victims. And everybody has a reason for doing what they do.

But "a reason" is not the same thing as reason itself.