This ‘Insult’ turns tiff into raging battle

Nominated for a foreign language Academy Award, Lebanon’s “The Insult” is a microcosm of Lebanon’s modern history and a look at a subject that resonates here in the U.S.

Beginning with a Christian Party rally, the film introduces us to Tony Hanna (an explosive Adel Karam), a Lebanese Christian auto repair shop owner, whose young wife (Rita Hayek) is about to give birth. But simmering resentments and past horrors come roaring to the surface when Tony has a confrontation with a Palestinian refugee contractor named Yasser Salameh (Kamel El Basha) over a drain pipe.

Yasser insults Tony and refuses to apologize. When Yasser’s boss tries to force

him, Tony invokes Ariel Sharon in a bit of anti-Palestinian hate speech and Yasser punches him, breaking two ribs. Things escalate from there, and soon we are in a courtroom, where father and daughter attorneys square off against one another, Yasser stands accused of assault and a country threatens to explode.

Directed and co-written by Ziad Doueiri, who has worked with Quentin Tarantino, “The Insult” is powerful and gripping. If some of the courtroom antics seem contrived and too neatly expository, Karam and El Basha, who was named best actor at the Venice Film Festival, hold it together as the adversaries whose enmity threatens to set fire to the Middle East, where the history is enormously complex and the battle lines are drawn in more places and for more reasons than most of us know. (“The Insult” contains profanity and violence.) COURT FIGHT: Top from left, Nadim Hobeika, Kamel El Basha and Diamand Bou Abboud appear in ‘The Insult.’ At right, Rita Hayek and Adel Karam.