Whispering Embers

Ali Nassar

Israel

Synopsis

As the world collapses, a young man is drawn into a fantasy love story in the face of rapid changes in the Islamic world.

REVIEW

Ali Nassar's film is about a man disappointed in love. But he has not become disenchanted with his wife, child, parents, or friends, nor have they abandoned him. Rather, he has been betrayed by ideology. A committed socialist if not communist, his world comes to an end when he sees Lenin's statute being removed from Red Square.

In this Palestinian/Israeli film, Jamil falls in love, marries, has a child, and disappears. His baffled wife tries magic and other, more traditional ways to locate him. Eventually she finds her husband's unpublished novel and begins to read it for clues.

The film dramatizes scenes from that novel, juxtaposing them against his wife's memories of their courtship and marriage. But the novel and the film transcend the romantic narrative elements, though initially the wife, Abir, sees the character of Layla in the novel as her rival. Rather, novel and film beautifully dramatize the power that ideals and ideology has over human beings, especially when contrasted to daily, domestic concerns. When she yearns merely for a house, he hopes to help overthrow capitalism and uplift the world's proletariat!

But the film then moves deftly onto a consideration of other ideologies, especially Western ideologies as they come in contact with the Muslim world, from Cleopatra through the Crusades and Richard the Lion Hearted, to socialism, and eventually, Muslim fundamentalism and its fight against "heresy."

That the film does so within the confines of the romantic narrative without ever becoming abstract is but one of the accomplishments of this film. An eye for detail, an unflinching depiction of obsessive behavior, and some visually entrancing moments such as the final scene are additional notable achievements.

-Tom Friedmann