‘Reports on Sarah and Saleem’ an intimate thriller
“The Reports on Sarah and Saleem,” the second solo-directed feature from Palestinian director Muayad Alayan, does not wear it politics on its sleeve, and that’s just one reason this intimate geopolitical thriller works so well.
To be clear, Alayan himself is open with his thoughts about the lives of Palestinians under Israeli occupation. But his muscular, dare I say Hemingway-esque narrative about a cross-border love affair doesn’t really have heroes and villains, just flawed human beings doing the best they can in the given circumstances, including their own mistakes.
It’s just that, in a surveillance state on high alert for terrorist threats, the stakes are so much higher than they should be.
Sarah and Saleem (Sivane Kretchner and Adeeb Safadi) are not Romeo and Juliet. She lives a life of relative privilege, married to an up-and-comer and running her own coffee shop in West Jerusalem.
Like many other Arabs, Saleem crosses the checkpoint from the Palestinian side of the city to work. He’s a delivery driver, and Sarah is on his route. They like to have hot sex in vehicles. His wife is pregnant with their second child. Her husband is a colonel in the Israeli army.
‘The Reports on Sarah and Saleem’
Great Fair Muayad Alayan. Adeeb Safadi, Sivane Kretchner. Not rated. Violence, nudity, sexuality, profanity.
In Arabic, Hebrew and English, with English subtitles. At Harkins Shea.
Bad
Good Bomb
What could possibly go wrong? The film opens with a frame story showing Saleem’s arrest and interrogation for “recruiting” an Israeli woman. Then the first hour is a flashback that knocks the dominoes over, from forbidden flirtation to military-intelligence scandal, a slow-motion car crash you can’t look away from. After that, is more turns of the screws, leading to a fateful moral dilemma and a pitch-perfect lady-or-the-tiger ending.
Alayan says his fictional story is inspired by two incidents involving people he knew. “Only in Jerusalem can private marital affairs have disproportionate consequences that destroy people’s lives,” he said in an interview for the Boston Palestine Film Festival in 2018.
That is almost certainly not true. It happens anywhere where two ethnic or national groups live side by side, tied together but also in tension, including any military occupation — it’s just that Israel’s occupation of Palestine has lasted so long (since the Six-Day War in 1967). It happened under South African Apartheid. And it happened under the American variety of apartheid, aka Jim Crow, which sent so many black men to prison for imagined crimes against white women.