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The Volatility Of Life in Lebanon featured in 'The Insult'

Cohen Media Group

The complications grow so thick and intertwined in Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult that the prospect of untangling them feels hopeless. Two guys get in what looks like a minor spat on the street in Beirut. But the fight eventually involves construction problems, Chinese and German cranes, politics, religion, ethnicity, the law, pregnancy and at least two separate families. The film reaches to depths of personal intimacy and in its next breath takes in an entire nation.

A construction crew on the Beirut street is supposed to fix code violations. A drain on a balcony dumps water onto passersby, but Tony the homeowner (Adel Karam) is hostile and rude to the workers. When the crew goes ahead, Tony smashes the new pipe, the construction foreman calls him a name – and off things go. All it takes is stubbornness.

The Insult gives a terrifying view of the volatility of life in Lebanon. Tony is Lebanese Christian; Yasser the foreman (Kamel El Basha) is a Palestinian living in a refugee camp on the outskirts of the city. The obscene name hurled at Tony is considered seriously insulting in Lebanon, but he eventually goes Yasser one better. Referring to the late Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, Tony says to his Palestinian adversary, “I wish Sharon had wiped you all-out.” That leads to a punch and broken ribs, and all the good efforts of Yasser’s boss to make peace are useless.

The Insult is a remarkable picture of the destructive power of anger, especially when it comes brewed with identity politics. Tony will not be appeased; he’s a loudmouth who wants an apology. But Yasser is a quiet man; it’s hard for him to speak, especially through his own anger, and Tony takes silence as refusal. And, of course the issue gets lost. Tony hates Palestinians, as does the fancy Lebanese Christian lawyer who takes the case. Yasser’s attorney has her own reasons – partly political – but she also holds a personal, family grudge against Tony’s lawyer.

The personal and the public can’t be separated. Personal history comes wrapped inside the history of the country. The Lebanese Civil War from 20 years ago becomes part of the argument between Yasser and Tony. The dispute winds up in an appeals court, with a long trial sequence. Tony’s lawyer brings in a witness who’s been in a wheelchair for two decades. He’d been a cook in the army and it turns out he was wounded by Yasser who fought for the Palestine Liberation Organization – and that somehow proves that Yasser is a thoroughly violent man unable to control himself, and that explains the fundamental malice behind Yasser’s punch. It’s like one of those incremental nursery rhymes:           

This is the cat that killed the rat

That ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.

But The Insult is not about nursery rhymes, and it’s no game. It gets into the history of comparative miseries and injustices – who’s been treated worse, the Palestinians or the Lebanese Christians; which massacre was bloodier; who bears the greater wrongs. And director Ziad Doueiri heads right into the midst of it all with striking close-ups inside angry crowds both in the courtroom and on the street. The movie doesn’t generalize; everything is about actual living human beings.

Most of all, though, the pain registers in Yasser’s face, which is lined and worried. Tony juts out his jaw like he’s ready to fight at any moment, but Yasser takes things in. His eyes are dark and sad. Most of the time, he holds his tongue, while those around him scream out their versions of what’s true and what’s right. At critical times, The Insult refuses to go for metaphor. It keeps matters in character. To side with Yasser – or Tony – is not to side with their factions. It’s to try to understand individual humanity in the face of all the noise around them.

Howie Movshovitz came to Colorado in 1966 as a VISTA Volunteer and never wanted to leave. After three years in VISTA, he went to graduate school at CU-Boulder and got a PhD in English, focusing on the literature of the Middle Ages. In the middle of that process, though (and he still loves that literature) he got sidetracked into movies, made three shorts, started writing film criticism and wound up teaching film at the University of Colorado-Denver. He continues to teach in UCD’s College of Arts & Media.
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