“I have such a manipulative mother,” Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiri says. “My God! She is such an outrageous lawyer.” Doueiri’s doughty ma is still practising law at the age of 80, busy with a campaign to allow children to inherit Lebanese nationality from their mothers as well as their fathers, still working pro bono for the refugees who now make up a staggering 30 per cent of the Lebanese population.
When he asked her to be his legal consultant for The Insult, a pitched courtroom battle between a Maronite Christian and a Palestinian refugee, it was the start of months of argument. “My mum is a left-wing radical,” he says. “I don’t necessarily share her views.”
Adel Karam (left), as Toni, and Kamel El Basha as Yasser in Ziad Doueiri’s Oscar-nominated film, The Insult.
At one point during the writing, she decided he was defending Lebanon’s Christian right-wing. “And I was, actually,” he declares. “I wasn’t hiding it.” She stopped sending over his dinners and had his father tell him her blood pressure was dropping because of him. “I don’t think her blood pressure was really down; she had the capacity to voluntarily lower the pressure,” he says. “I said ‘Mum, I don’t buy your story. Come back to work’.” He laughs. “By the way, when the film was nominated for the (foreign language) Oscar, she was so proud of it. This is such a personal film, Stephanie!”
The Insult is a very clever film, in fact. Volatile car mechanic Toni (Adel Kara) is watering the plants on his balcony and manages to splash the municipal building crew sent to fix things like faulty pipes. Yasser, the works inspector (Kamel El Basha), is Palestinian; Toni is a Falangist who listens to the late Bachir Gemayel’s fascist speeches while he works. After a couple of arguments, Toni tells Yasser he wishes all his sort had been killed when the going was good, thus pretty much asking to be punched. It is this dispute over nothing– a broken pipe – that ends up in court. Everyone is following it; everyone has taken sides. It’s us against them, whoever “they” are.
The actual incident over the pipe was real. It was Doueiri who told a Palestinian engineer he wished his people had been wiped out when the going was good; the difference was that he apologised immediately and the situation was resolved. It’s a shocking thing to say. Was he shocked at himself? “Why? It’s my nature. I said what I said because I just say things. I said something very hurtful, but so what? Insulting someone is also a form of expression.” Doueiri says he thrives on conflict, which is one reason he keeps returning to his crowded homeland to make films. “There are so many stories there. It is so dynamic, it really is. Maybe because I grew up in the civil war in the 1970s, this left me with a taste for where conflict can lead.”
That appetite led to a goodly amount of trouble last year, when he returned to Beirut from showing The Insult at the Venice Film Festival – with the film having won a prize for best actor – and was arrested and interrogated at the airport, his Lebanese and French passports confiscated. The authorities were following up charges connected to his previous film The Attack (2012), about a surgeon who finds out that his wife is a suicide bomber. Doueiri had cast some Israeli actors and shot partly in Israel, where Lebanese citizens are forbidden to travel. There was a flurry of protest from the film industry worldwide; two days later, after being cleared by a military tribunal, he was freed. At roughly the same time, The Insult was nominated as Lebanon’s entry to the Oscars. Of course, that’s the kind of story he loves.
Doueiri is 53. He left Beirut during the civil war to study film-making in the United States, then worked as a camera assistant on several films with Quentin Tarantino, whose excitable conversational style seems to have rubbed off on him. After 18 years in the US he moved to France, where he can more readily find funding. “It’s not really a choice. France is a beautiful museum. A very sane place to live but does it inspire me? Not really.” He feels he understands America; his next film will be set there, among Trump’s people. “Obama was a great president but such a boring guy, there is nothing to write about the Obama era! I find that the Trump era is so rich, I’m loving it. People hate it! My friends in California, they want to secede and I am just getting my biggest joy following the news.” So his heroes will be Alt-right supporters? “With a twist. I like a twist.”
The curious thing about all this fighting talk is that Doureiri’s film is a model of measured control. Hostilities between the two antagonists attain craziness only by tiny, entirely credible increments; reconciliation, of a sort, is reached in a similarly crab-like way, concluding on a hopeful note. Doueiri sighs at this. “You know I was told this film is about moderation and conciliation,” he says. “It’s not. I am not a moderate guy. I do take sides; it’s just that I change sides every 15 minutes of the movie. I started by asking myself whether in Lebanon something so silly could evolve into a national debate, a national crisis. And in Lebanon it can; it is a country sitting on the palm of the Devil, as we say.” It ends on a positive note, he says, because nothing else exported from the Middle East is positive. “It’s nothing but problems. I think it’s important in this world. Forget about the world, it’s important for me.”
Which makes you wonder where he’s really coming from. Doueiri wrote the film with his then wife and regular collaborator, Joelle Touma, at the same time as they were negotiating their divorce. For anyone else, that would be certain hell. “It was the best divorce I ever had because we had to deal with some of the problems, but then we had to go back to the scenes,” Doueiri told journalists in Venice. Touma comes from a prominent Christian family. “I grew up hating the right and 20 years later, I wanted to re-examine the source of this,” he says. “What happened on the other side? Who were these enemies who were considered the Christian right wing in Lebanon? And I found out by dating women from the Christian world.”
There is no time to ask what his Muslim, “left-wing extremist”, pro-Palestinian mother thought of that partnership, although it is safe to speculate that there were plenty of animated conversations. Does she still think his film is an apologia for the right? “Between her and herself, yes, but when she has to go talk to her circle, she defends it. She says ‘no, our son is not right-wing; he is very left-wing; look at our past’. But it is a right-wing film in my opinion.” Clearly, he loves being at loggerheads. I find myself wanting to meet that woman, with her progressive opinions, culinary expertise and causes, more than anything. Maybe she’s manipulating me too.
The Insult is now screening.
Source: Read Full Article