The Insult
You wonder how these things start. How the world got into such a mess. Religious hatred, ethnic slaughter, racial discrimination, civil war. In this captivating and lively film, Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiri lays out a blueprint for discord. It all starts with an insult. Or if you want to take the long view, the roots stretch back decades to Lebanon’s civil war, which ended in 1990.
Tony Hanna (Adel Karam), now in his mid-thirties, was a kid back then. He owns a garage, and is an enthusiastic supporter of Lebanon’s anti-Palestinian Christian Party. His young wife, Shirine (Rita Hayek), is pregnant. She wants to move to larger quarters, and mentions Tony’s old family place in the country. Tony is stubborn. He likes it where they are.
Where they are is a nice Beirut apartment with a terrace, where Tony waters plants, and one day the runoff splashes down through an unauthorized drainpipe onto Yasser Salameh (Kamel El Basha), the Palestinian illegal immigrant foreman of a construction crew working in the neighborhood. Yasser knocks on the door and offers to fix the pipe. Tony slams the door in his face. Yasser reroutes the pipe anyway. Tony smashes it with a crowbar. Yasser calls him a name. And they’re off.
Tony is a hothead. Yasser is more the slow-burn type. Both are stiffnecked. Their wives plead with them to loosen up. Tony demands an apology. Yasser’s boss tries to negotiate a peace, and orders his foreman to extend the olive branch. It doesn’t work out. Things escalate and turn violent. There are unintended consequences. The matter winds up in court.
And it grows, and grows, dominating the TV news, stirring up factions, whipping up frenzied passions in the streets. Old national wounds are torn open. Both sides retain high-powered lawyers with agendas of their own. Appearing for Tony is the redoubtable Wadji Wehbe (Camille Salameh); for the defense, a young woman named Nadine (Diamand Bou Abboud), who brings something more than her legal skills to the courtroom drama.
Doueri, a pro-Palestinian Lebanese activist, wrote the screenplay with his wife Joelle Touma, from a right-wing Christian background, while they were going through a divorce. To understand the issues more fully, each focused on the alien character’s perspective.
The resulting story sometimes lands a bit heavy-handedly, but it provides fascinating and revealing insights into the anatomy of a conflict, and throws open a window into one of the world’s many trouble spots. It’s on the Oscar shortlist for Best Foreign Language Film. — Jonathan Richards