Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Tarzan Nasser, Arab Nasser
Starring: Hiam Abbass, Salim Daw
You wonder at what point it’s all going to stop mattering, when life’s
pleasures and surprises will definitively and inevitably run out: one day
you’re at an age where it’s unseemly to hang out in the club, the next day
(perhaps more disconcertingly) you wonder what the attraction was in the
first place. And then, then what happens to you: your curiosity, your
interest, your passion for everything? Your ability to fall in love anew
at an age when you’ve seen it all before, and, frankly, you’re tired of
it? Is there hope?! Well, here’s Gaza Mon Amour.
Depicting the tentative first steps of such an autumnal relationship,
Arab and Tarzan Nasser’s film is a love story which quietly
crackles with human spirit and compassion as it tells the story of
sixty-somethings Issa (Salim Dau), a fisherman, and Siham (Hiam Abbass), a market worker, as they strike up a companionship in contemporary
Palestine. Those warbling, portentous queries which opened the review (and
nibble away at us as we age)? They don’t apply to the Nasser brothers'
mini-masterpiece, which is instead gentle, funny and moving, refreshingly
free from the expected angst that its plotline and loci would imply.
That’s not to say that the film ignores the conflict, or the fact that
each of its protagonists are getting on a bit. However, these
immutabilities are firmly pressed into the background; the television
inexorably breaks quiet news of destruction, while the generally assured
Issa and Siham’s family/colleagues pontificate about each’s single status.
In neatly observed gender priorities, Issa’s male co-worker congratulates
him on managing to avoid all the ear ache of a marriage, while at the same
time his sister lines up (literally!) potential spouses for him! No dice,
sis, Issa has his eye on the mysterious and attractive Siham (whose
daughter applies similar pressure to her), a local woman who he contrives
to share moments with in the most gorgeously sweet and touching ways
imaginable. He offers her his umbrella when it rains at the bus stop, and
pretends he needs his trousers taken up at the haberdashery where she
works. No swiping right or left, here.
See, as a man who spends his nights catching fish in a trawler, and his
mornings mongering said sardines at the market, Issa’s life has little
call for sartorial elegance. There is little call for much, really. It’s a
lonely and edging on destitute existence (at one point a man with a
clipboard warns Issa that he ‘pays or we cut off the power’- !), at an age
where the world conspires to make you irrelevant. So, imagine Issa’s
surprise when one dark morning he hauls a full size, and fully priapic,
statue of Apollo from the Mediterranean (well, the god did transform into
a dolphin back in the day). It has to be a sign, right? After all, this is
the deity associated with truth, prophecy and healing...
Or maybe the emergence of the statue is just going to bring more problems
for Issa, troubles which start with how to get the heavy load home and
ends with Issa being banged up overnight (with a little Goonies style
effigy splintering in between), but at least SOMETHING is happening. It’s
never too late, it turns out, for life to spring a little surprise and
offer some adventure. And, who knows, maybe a castrated statue of an
Olympian deity will provide the inspiration required to properly approach
Siham, too.
Gaza Mon Amour is a beautiful film, with its elemental power
drawn from the lived-in qualities of the performers, the comfortable and
deeply affecting verisimilitude which the film creates, exuding warmth and
emotion from the white dust and broken concrete of its setting. Fall in
love.
Gaza Mon Amour is on US/CAN VOD
from November 5th. A UK/ROI release has yet to be announced.
