Obviously some movies require more concentration than others. Anytime you’re dealing with a foreign language and the need to read subtitles while also taking in the moving images (hence the word ‘movie’) on the screen your concentration level must already be on full alert.
Then we have the Israeli film Ajami, nominated earlier this year for the Foreign Language Film Academy Award, which draws its title from its setting – a religiously mixed neighborhood of Jaffa populated by Jews and Arab Muslims and Christians. Unless you’re intimately familiar with the metropolis of Tel Aviv-Jaffa, you will have your work cut out for you in working out the subtleties of the film. Add to that the film’s disjointed narrative, broken up into 5 chapters which don’t necessarily occur in a linear timeline, each section focusing on a different protagonist and building upon and enlightening the previous entries and you have a recipe for disaster.
This is meant as a warning, not as a criticism, although the film’s structure is somewhat faulty. Think about all the films set in LA or New York that demand a certain geographic knowledge of the city. Ajami not only demands that of its viewers but also an understanding of the tense sociopolitical underpinnings of the region. The story is understandable without such knowledge, but your appreciation would be enriched by it.
One example is a subplot involving one character, an Arab Muslim, in a clandestine relationship with a girl. I did not know until late in the film, when her father says it explicitly, that she and her family are Arab Christians. Surely someone familiar with the particulars would have picked up on that detail, unless it was the intent of the filmmakers to keep it hidden.
But what of the social aspects of the film? It was co-written and directed by Scandar Copti (an Arab Israeli) and Yaron Shani (a Jewish Israeli) so to some extent we, as outsiders, have to trust that they’ve done their best to present a balanced view of life in the Ajami neighborhood.
The film opens with the murder of a 15 year old boy in the street, the victim of mistaken identity by the local mafia who had intended to continue a blood libel by killing the eldest nephew, Omar, of a local business owner who shot one of the mafia. Omar’s younger brother Nasri narrates the opening, saying he had a feeling some weeks earlier that something bad was going to happen. I’ll tell you up front that this is not the only bad thing that happens.
Omar works out a truce which gives him 3 weeks to come up with an amount of money he can’t raise without doing something illegal. If he doesn’t pay, both Nasri and his mother will be in danger. If they run, they’ll be found.
Subsequent chapters follow Malek, a teenager kept in hiding in Tel Aviv as he works illegally; Binj (played by Copti), a friend of Malek and Omar; and Dando, a Jewish police officer searching for his brother, a soldier gone missing; Malek’s mother requires an expensive medical procedure to avoid death. So already in the second chapter you can see the groundwork being laid for Omar and Malek to join together because, after all, necessity is the mother of invention.
Although several stories are told in the separate chapters, Omar is really the main character. He is introduced in the first and the biggest moment of dramatic impact in the film, which comes at the end, is directly related to him. One of the unifying themes of each story is that of family and of brothers, in particular. The blood libel against all members of Omar’s family sets his story in motion. He is protective of his mother and Nasri, who fears for his older brother’s safety. Malek betrays the man who employs and hides him in order to help his mother. Dando is motivated by the search for his missing brother and then revenge for his ultimate fate. Banj’s fate is sealed in some part by the unfortunate actions of his brother, who has a late-night altercation with a Jewish neighbor that ends in bloodshed. Despite the differences in religion and upbringing, family remains the tie that binds.
The trivia listing at IMDb notes that the dialogue was improvised. I have no trouble believing that as the whole film has a kind of documentary feel to it. There are a lot of handheld shots and the camera stays close and intimate with the characters. Wide shots and cross cutting are rare. As for the dialogue, I was sure in some early scenes that the actors were stepping on each others’ lines. Now I know why. It adds a very natural and unpolished feel to what is supposed to be a gritty street drama.
The film’s biggest flaw, however, is its structure. Each chapter layers itself onto the others. We glean more information about the previous chapters as the current one unfolds. Each chapter contains some event we don’t fully understand which is then explained in the subsequent chapters. This has some dramatic effect in that we’re often left wondering why something has happened or why a character has made what seems a very bizarre decision. You carry that tension with you through the next twenty minutes or so until the reason is revealed. This keeps the audience primed and nervous with anticipation.
After the film was finished I kept asking myself if it would work as well with a linear narrative. My suspicion is that, although it would fundamentally change the way the tension in the narrative plays out, we would have a film that still gets the same message across while being a lot less confounding. That’s a difficult question to answer with certainty with just one viewing, but it wasn’t quite good enough to warrant a second.
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