The Attack contemplates heavy issues

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      Starring Ali Suliman, Reymond Amsalem, and Uri Gavriel. In Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles. Rating not available.

      One secret of filmmaking is probably to make a movie that someone, somewhere, will want to ban. In this case, The Attack is banned by 22 Arab nations, which—given people’s inclination toward forbidden things—should make it popular everywhere else. Of course, The Attack is a contemplative terrorism drama set in Israel and the West Bank, not Human Centipede 2.

      There is a bombing in a Tel Aviv restaurant and 17 people are killed. Amin Jaafari (Ali Suliman), an esteemed Arab-Israeli surgeon, treats the grievously wounded and then is called to view another body. It is the corpse of his wife, Siham (Reymond Amsalem), the apparent suicide bomber. Even without the intense cop (Uri Gavriel) riding Amin for information, the doctor is inclined to want some answers himself.

      One thing Amin and The Attack’s Lebanese-American director, Ziad Doueiri, want to know is why someone “snaps”. How does the seemingly happy wife of a well-off, handsome doctor turn terrorist? Despite the subject’s inherent provocativeness and some moody-sexy flashbacks of the couple’s courtship, the double life of Siham is not the most fascinating thing here.

      As Amin travels to the city of Nablus, bent on tracking down who “brainwashed” his wife, the contrast between a (relatively) orderly Tel Aviv and West Bank chaos is compelling but also rather familiar. Doueiri plots his mystery with deliberate steps, and both what Amin discovers and the head spaces of the long-coexisting Israelis and Palestinians feel a tad unsurprising and easy.

      Much more interesting is the good doctor (played with excellent subtlety by Suliman), once the very model of a man bridging two worlds, existing above the messiness. “It must be strange for you, living among them,” his niece says of his Israeli existence. Life is strange. And things fall apart.

      Watch the trailer for The Attack.

      Comments

      1 Comments

      sabine mabardi

      Aug 5, 2013 at 11:27am

      Your review of the movie "The Attack" lacks one important piece of information; the movie is based on the novel "The Attack" by the very famous Algerian-French novelist Yasmina Khadra, author of numerous novels on the so-called "Arab" world, including "What the Day Owes to the Night" (made into a movie). "The Attack" is part of a trilogy on the Middle-East: "the Swallows of Kabul" (also a film) and "The Sirens of Baghdad". Mentioning his name in your review might have encouraged your readers, who want to gain more perspective on the relationship between that part of the world and the "West", to delve into these important novels.