Oy Jerusalem

Before it was a movie, O Jerusalem! was a book, a sprawling history of the events—the expiration of the British Mandate, the 1947 U.N. vote to partition Palestine and the first Arab-Israeli war that followed—leading to the birth of the state of Israel. Though non-fiction, the book had a novelistic style, and when it was published in 1972, it sold like a mass-market paperback. But just because it “reads like a whodunit,” as the New York Times declared, it does not necessarily follow that the book makes good material for a movie. Nonetheless, the makers of the new film O Jerusalem!, led by the French director and screenwriter Elie Chouraqui, decided to try their luck.

The task of distilling a 600-page history into a 100-minute movie is an unenviable one, and the solution the filmmakers settled on was simply not to do so. Instead they tell the story of a tense friendship between two fictional characters, a Palestinian and a Jew, set against the backdrop of the political and military events described in the book. The film opens in New York City in 1946, where Saïd, a Palestinian, meets Bobby, an American Jew, and the two become good friends. As Israeli statehood nears reality, the friends head to the Holy Land, where Bobby is at first welcomed as a guest in Saïd’s home. But as the first battles are fought, with each losing dear ones to enemy fire, the two become hyper-politicized, severing contact with one another and joining their respective armies.

For the rest of the film, the two friends-cum-enemies serve as the audience’s tour guides to the most important events of the war. The screenwriters endow each with an uncanny ability, like Woody Allen’s Leonard Zelig, to be wherever the action and major players are at any given moment. They just happen to be on a bus with Golda Meir, and Bobby takes direct orders from no less than David Ben-Gurion.

I do not begrudge the screenwriters this device of fictional characters as flies on the walls of history, without which any sustained drama would be difficult to convey. What I do begrudge them is how flat and uninteresting these characters are, and how stilted their language. So much of the dialogue must be devoted to historical exposition that the characters can never become fully human. One early scene, in which Bobby and a friend visit an impromptu Jewish headquarters, actually has this pair of lines: “Jake, who are these people?” “It’s the Haganah, Bobby. Our secret army.” With characters speaking like they’re preparing for a high school history exam, I caught myself expecting to see “RE-ENACTMENT” flash across the screen.

It is a sorry waste of considerable acting talent. Saïd Taghmaoui, who plays Saïd, has deserved a much better lead role ever since his agonizing scenes as an Iraqi interrogator in Three Kings. Relative unknown JJ Feild does his best with the role of Bobby, and manages to display great emotion as the caricatures and stereotypes surrounding him are cut down by gunfire. And Ian Holm is an inspired choice for Ben-Gurion, but his meager, lifeless lines enable Holm to give us nothing more than an uncanny impersonation.

I feel a pang of guilt at being so critical of a film that so earnestly wants to do good. And, of course, a film with such earnestness has its moments of pathos: At one point, a father learns his daughter has been killed and goes weak in the knees, burying his hands in the provisions of flour she struggled to bring to Jews under siege in Jerusalem. At another, despite the fresh blood staining their clothes, Arabs and Jews embrace during a ceasefire, with something approaching mutual respect.

But the film’s most earnest moments are often the most infuriating. Cloying, sermonizing narration appears out of nowhere at the film’s end, saying that “on both sides, people like Bobby and Saïd continue to nurture a seed of peace in their hearts.” The film’s soundtrack goes out on a delicate, hopeful, arpeggiated piano chord, and you get the impression that the filmmakers think that, just maybe, they have made a helpful, though small, contribution to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict.

If they have done so, bless them. But I doubt it. The film never decides whether it wants to entertain, to instruct or to motivate, and so it ends up failing as drama, as history and as a call to peace. Ultimately, it is less stirring than the newspaper and television reports that still regularly come from this part of the world with tidings of continuing conflict. The film adds little to our understanding of Israel, of Palestine or of the war-torn holy city for which so many people—on both sides—have died. Such illuminations would be helpful now, as the prospect of dividing the city nears the peace table again.
—David Zax