Ajami (2010):
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Release Date:February 3rd, 2010
Director:Scandar Copti, Yaron Shani
Writer:Scandar Copti, Yaron Shani
Starring:Fouad Habash, Nisrine Rihan
Studio:Kino International
Genre:Drama
The Israeli movie “Ajami,” one of the five Oscar nominees for best foreign-language film, takes its name from a rough neighborhood in Jaffa, a mostly Arab city just south of Tel Aviv. This particular urban conflict zone may be unfamiliar to most American viewers, but it bears a definite kinship to mean streets we know very well, at least from movies and television. Crime is endemic, bonds of family and friendship can be both sustaining and fatal, and the urge to escape is no match for the gravitational pull of the place itself.
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The population includes innocent, imperiled children; restless young guys in love with beautiful, unattainable women; honorable thieves; dirty cops; and powerful men who dwell on both sides of the law. The possibility of violence hovers over even apparently benign encounters. Guns are drawn, blood is shed, and the drive to do the right thing usually ends in tragedy. We could almost be in the Los Angeles of “Colors” or “Boyz N the Hood,” the Baltimore of “The Wire” or the Rio de Janeiro of “City of God.”
But every city has its own lures and snares, and the universal race for money, love and power is always run on a local course. The petty machinations of the police, drug dealers and influence peddlers in “Ajami” unfold in a context of political conflict and communal mistrust. Written and directed by Scandar Copti, an Israeli Arab (who also plays an important supporting role), and Yaron Shani, who is Jewish, the film is acutely insightful about the social divisions within Israel, but it examines them without scolding or sentimentality.
There is no finger-pointing here, and no group hugging either. Instead there is a sharp sense of just how deep and wide the schisms are, not just between Jews and Arabs but also between Christians and Muslims, rich and poor, farmers and city dwellers, men and women, young and old and so on.
One of the pleasures of “Ajami,” a tough and in many ways unsparing movie, is its deep immersion in the beats and melodies of everyday life in Jaffa and beyond. The large cast consists mainly of nonprofessional actors for whom the locations are home, and their earnest, diffident performances combine with a ground-level, on-the-move shooting style to give the film an extraordinary immediacy. Some of the scenes, as they unwind slowly and take surprising turns, have the rough, surprising rhythm of a documentary.
At the same time, though, the film has an ingenious and carefully worked-out structure. Dividing their story into chapters that are presented out of chronological order, the filmmakers embrace the multi-stranded, decentered narrative strategy that has become one of the prevalent conventions of contemporary world cinema. There are no coincidences, only hidden connections among apparently random events, some of which happen more than once so that the deeper patterns can be revealed.
It starts with an accident: a vendetta killing that takes the wrong life and sets off a further chain of reprisals. Nasri (Fouad Habash), 13, and his older brother Omar (Shahir Kabaha), a big-boned, sweet-natured young man, are caught up in it. Trying to protect himself and his family, Omar winds up in debt to Abu Elias (Youssef Sahwani), a local restaurant owner who is the de facto mayor of the neighborhood and the father of Hadir (Ranin Karim), whom Omar dreams of marrying. Elias is a man whose acts of generosity always come with a catch, and you fear for anyone under his wing, including a teenager named Malek (Ibrahim Frege), whose mother is gravely ill and who sneaks in from the West Bank to work in the restaurant.
How exactly these people will cross paths with a policeman named Dando (Eran Naim) is one of the mysteries that hold you in a state of dread through much of the movie. But though it is partly an underworld crime story, “Ajami” uses the genre as a way of exploring the conditions in which its characters live as well as their psychological complexities.
None of them are simple. Dando, a brute and a bully on the job, is devoted to his children and is anguished about the fate of his younger brother, a soldier who has apparently been kidnapped by Palestinian militants. He is, to some extent, a mirror image of Omar, driven to do terrible things because of a volatile mixture of panic, rage and family feeling.
That the plot resolves a bit too neatly and abruptly is a small disappointment, given how much messy, vibrant and difficult life has been woven into two hours. You emerge from “Ajami” moved and also a little worn out, but mostly grateful for the heart, craft and intelligence the movie has shown.
Ajami: Opens on Wednesday in Manhattan. Written, directed and edited by Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani; director of photography, Boaz Yehonatan Yacov; music by Rabiah Buchari; produced by Mosh Danon and Thanassis Karathanos; released by Kino International. At Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, west of Avenueof the Americas, South Village. In Arabic and Hebrew, with English subtitles. Running time: 2 hours. This film is not rated. WITH: Shahir Kabaha (Omar), Ibrahim Frege (Malek), Fouad Habash (Nasri), Youssef Sahwani (Abu Elias), Ranin Karim (Hadir), Eran Naim (Dando) and Scandar Copti (Binj).
Ajami” gets right to the tragic heart of the matter. Before the viewer knows what or whom he’s watching, a young boy is gunned down in the middle of a city street in broad daylight. Though a backstory is soon provided, the incident truly and crucially never makes sense. Revenge, recompense, clumsy justice, even apparently legitimate legal proceedings provide a measure of context and set the rest of the narrative in motion, but the brutal fact of the murder is never gotten over. Violence will return, again and again over the course of the film, but it is not to be justified by theoretical or political abstractions, and its impact is never softened. For all of its stories, characters, and perspectives, “Ajami” is essentially a sustained gaze into a widening, all-encompassing trap. Life is cheap, death is random, and no one is safe.
Co-directed by Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew, and Scandar Copti, an Israeli-born Palestinian, “Ajami,” which has been nominated for an Academy Award in Best Foreign Language Film, thankfully bears no trace of political compromise or pandering parity, and is instead a sustained cry of urgent despair. The film proceeds in chapters and gradually intersected strands: an Arab-Israeli family becomes imperiled and financially ruined by a petty vendetta; a Palestinian works illegally in Jaffa to pay for his mother’s surgery; a Jewish cop struggles to remain impartial on the job after his younger brother has gone missing; a Palestinian hopes to marry a Jewish woman while another falls for a Christian; paths cross, plots are hatched, messes get messier.
As an interconnected narrative, “Ajami” has more in common with the beehive sociology of “Gomorrah” than the contrived hysteria of “Babel” or “Mammoth.” But the film still slips into overdetermination. Its final chapter in particular stakes emotional pay-off on surprise last-minute connections between loose narrative wires, providing an odd formal relief from what had been a deliberate and morally meaningful chaos. The basic problem with multistrand dramas remains the incompatibility between sober realism and heavy-handed, master-of-puppets plotting. Structure corrupts mise-en-scene, macro demeans micro. The best of the bunch, to which “Ajami” belongs, keep the audience yoked into ground-level experience without permitting too much in the way of allegorical or sociopolitical distance.
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