Film: Miral
Year of production: 2010
Release date: 4th April 2011
Studio: Pathe!
Certificate: 15
Running time: 108 mins
Director: Julian Schnabel
Starring: Freida Pinto, Hiam Abbass, Asma Al Shiukhy, Neemeh Khalil, Jamil Khoury
Genre: Drama
Format: DVD
Country of production: France/Israel/Italy/India
Language: English
The plight of the Palestinian people and their ongoing struggle for recognition and statehood forms the backdrop of Miral, US artist and director Julian Schnabel’s 2010 biographical drama, but the film is really about the early life and political awakening of its titular subject, Palestinian author and journalist Miral Shahin. Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Schnabel’s partner Rula Jebreal, who also wrote the film’s screenplay, Miral has caused a fair degree of controversy for the way it portrays the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it is dedicated “to everybody on both sides who believes peace is still possible.”
Where most biopics focus almost exclusively on the lives of the subjects whose stories they seek to tell, Miral is unusual in the way it interweaves stories of people who had a profound impact on the life of its central subject. Miral Shahin (basically a pseudonym for Rula Jebreal) was born in 1973, but the film goes as far back as 1947, just before the formation of the Israeli state, in order to establish context and expose viewers to people who are vital to Miral’s life story.
The film opens in 1994, as two women carefully prepare the body of an old woman for a funeral, praying in Arabic as they do so. As we will later discover, the body is that of Hind Husseini, a Palestinian woman who set up the Dar El Tifl children’s home in 1948. Over the years, the home provided refuge and education to thousands of Palestinian children, one of whom was Miral.
Also central to Miral’s story are Nadia, her deeply troubled mother, and Fatima, a former nurse who helps Nadia when the two women are thrown together in prison. Nadia is imprisoned for six months after assaulting a Jewish woman on a bus, while Fatima received three life sentences for planting a bomb that doesn’t go off in a cinema. After Nadia is released from prison, she gets married to Jamal, Fatima’s brother, and has Miral, but when her daughter is still a young child she kills herself, wracked by guilt over her drinking and adulterous affairs.
After her mother’s death, Miral is taken by her father Jamal to Dar El Tifl, where she is placed in the care of Hind. Jamal is a deeply loving man who continues to visit Miral at weekends, but he is determined that she will not end up like Nadia or Fatima. By 1987, however, the Palestinian uprising is in full flow, and Miral becomes increasingly politicised. Eventually, after being caught with revolutionary literature, she is detained, interrogated and tortured by Israeli authorities. Soon after, in 1993, the Oslo agreement, in which the Israeli government agrees to the creation of a Palestinian state, is signed, and Miral leaves her homeland to study in Italy…
Miral isn’t quite in the same league as The Diving Bell And The Butterfly, Schnabel’s powerfully intense 2007 biopic about the French journalist and author Jean-Dominique Bauby, but it’s certainly not the one-sided failure that some critics have described it as. Schnabel’s mother was involved in the Zionist movement in the US, and his girlfriend Jebreal has clearly given him insight into the Palestinian struggle, so he is arguably well placed to understand both sides of the conflict.
Inevitably, perhaps, given the true life story that Miral is based on, it’s a film that will be seen by some as a simplistic account of an ongoing, highly complex conflict. The film makes it clear that the 1993 Oslo agreement is yet to be honoured by the Israelis, and the archival footage used in Miral doesn’t present a favourable view of their occupation of Palestinian territories, but Schnabel also attempts to show that not all Israelis are the coldly indifferent, right-wing zealots they are sometimes painted as.
Towards the end of the film, Miral befriends Lisa, the Jewish girlfriend of her cousin Samir, and it dawns on her that many younger Israelis do not share the older Israeli generation’s contempt for Palestinians. In one pivotal scene, Lisa dismisses her father, an Israeli army officer, by joking that he thinks all Palestinians are terrorists. In another important scene, Schnabel deploys subtle humour to show how Miral’s aunt attempts to make Lisa feel uncomfortable by exaggerating her Arabic identity when Samir brings Lisa home for a meal.
Miral is also full of Schnabel’s trademark visual panache, and he makes highly effective use of close-ups and saturated colours that heighten the atmosphere. Miral does have its flaws, though; some of the performances are a little wooden, and star turns by Willem Dafoe and Vanessa Redgrave are unnecessary distractions. Redgrave barely features, but Dafoe pops up a couple of times as Edward Smith, an American man who first meets Hind in 1947 and then reappears in 1967 as a US colonel working for the UN to briefly help Hind, and gaze admiringly at her. There’s no doubting Dafoe’s acting ability, but his character seems tacked on in a slightly cloying attempt to show that Americans are not always the bogeymen in the Middle East.
Miral is unlikely to be remembered as one of Schnabel’s best films, but it’s a brave and heartfelt attempt to tell the story of an inspirational Palestinian woman and the people who had an influence on who she became. JG
No comments:
Post a Comment