Border incident: Lemon Tree

The new luxury home of Israel Navon (Doron Tavory) overlooks the border that divides Israel from the West Bank. Just over that border is a well-kept lemon grove tended by Salma (Hiam Abbass), a widow in her late 40s whose children have all grown and moved away. Her trees are so close and so fecund that if he wanted Israel could twist an arm through the wire fence and pluck fruit right from the branches. But according to Israel’s crack team of security advisors this very fecundity “poses an imminent threat to Israeli security,” it’s shady patches a veritable breeding ground for a deadly terrorist ambush. They advise Israel to have the entire grove leveled. Israel is the Israeli Minister of Defense, and he does what he’s told.

So we’ve got a character who seems to represent, to a conspicuous degree, the state of Israel. His name, lest we fail to draw the parallel, is Israel. He’s well spoken, and possesses the confidence of a man accustomed to power, privilege and a sense of entitlement. We’ve got a patch of land that seems to represent, to a conspicuous degree, the people of Palestine. It’s modest but lovely, vulnerable yet resilient, and carries with it a deep personal history. Salma and her elderly assistant are hard-working paragons of proletariat integrity. Salma refuses to allow her trees to be destroyed, even when assured of compensation for her loss. She hires a lawyer named Ziad (Ali Suliman) whose practice barely survives off of whatever divorce suits he can scrounge up. Salma’s case seems hopeless, but her plight earns Ziad’s loyalty. It also appeals to the international media hungry for some fresh human interest to attach to the ongoing story of this fraught region. She takes it to the Supreme Court.

If all this seems rather too forceful an allegory, it’s also, happily, a somewhat misleading set-up. If you’ll pardon the pun, Eran Riklis’ Lemon Tree (Etz Limon) grows on you. While Riklis seems to be cultivating a simplistic spin on David and Goliath, this film’s real roots lie elsewhere. In fact, it’s far less pointedly about the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict than it is about the politics of gender and familial roles. Across that fence from Salma, residing in that shaded fortress is Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), Israel’s lovely wife. Though Mira sympathizes with Salma she never quite manages to do very much about the situation and the two women never quite manage to meet, yet, in some very basic ways that betray their obvious imbalance of power, they share more than either realizes.

Of course the story, written by Riklis and Suha Arraf, who collaborated previously on Riklis’ The Syrian Bride, is fundamentally about Salma, who finds no unconditional support from anyone save Ziad. Her few friends toss around a lot of blanket condemnations of the Israeli government, yet they neither condone her acceptance of compensation nor her fight to keep her land. When, following a scene of truly elegant and understated eroticism, we begin to sense a romance developing between Salma and her significantly younger lawyer, these same friends start coming round to warn her that her supposedly undignified behaviour won’t be tolerated.

Abbass, so moving in The Visitor, embodies Salma with such graceful transitions that her face, so beautiful and imperious, can seem to shift from hard and stoic to smooth and amorous while barely moving a muscle. Every time she applies or removes her headscarf, she conveys her decision with some intricate variation. Salma’s instincts and abilities register as maternal. As we watch her go about her routines, she seems built to tend soil, to prepare food and scrub floors, to graciously fulfill all the expectations of the narrow-minded patriarchy. Yet when the first signs of longing colour her cheeks it’s as though some dormant blood rushes through her. The effect is quietly exhilarating. Lemon Tree is thoughtful and engaging enough, but Abbass’ performance is uncommonly rich in specificity and feeling, and elevates the film to a whole other level.

12 men, voluble, tired, not so angry

“Everything here is very Russian somehow,” muses one of the 12 in 12, Burnt by the Sun director Nikita Mikhalkov’s reconvening of 12 Angry Men in contemporary Moscow. The boy on trial for killing his father is now a Chechen and saddled with all the unfortunate baggage that entails. The jurors are still all men, though, as the truncated title implies, they’re not all that angry anymore. This is Russia, after all, and postwar American presumptuousness and obliviousness has been replaced by post-Soviet cynicism and fatigue. Even the lone initial holdout on the required unanimous decision of guilty bares only the vaguest hint of the righteousness, endurance and authority that characterized Henry Fonda’s character in Sidney Lumet’s 1957 sorta classic.

The ostensible Russianness of 12 is compounded by the film’s epic duration, which stays in session for well over an hour longer than its predecessor. Yet the gist of the story’s developments—the airing of racial or classist prejudices, the unearthing of negligent representation of the defendant, the revelation of personal agendas, the swaying of one juror after another—is remarkably faithful to the source material. What makes 12 so long, and what makes it at times feel longer, is a lot of overly elaborate choreography in the school gymnasium that serves as makeshift jury quarters; overlong, melodramatic digressions and tangents on the parts of nearly everyone present; ongoing cutaways to the defendant stoically waiting in his cell; and flashbacks to urban war zones to help us reflect on the sort of unforgiving world the kid comes from. All these elements seem designed to “open up” what was essentially a chamber piece playing out in real-time, but they really just sap the film’s urgency, distract from the issues at hand, and confuse the film’s sense of purpose.

Rather than focus on the ambiguities of justice and the looming threat of infection from reasonable doubts, 12 makes partial attempts to give the audience the trail the jurors never saw—the one the defendant deserved. But the evidence as displayed is wildly inconclusive. All that really matters, or should matter, is what happens in the room. The true tension arises from our inability to know anything more about what really happened than they jurors know, to gradually understand that uncertainty is inescapable, that even if the kid did kill his dad he cannot be lawfully convicted based on what the jurors have been able to glean during the trail.

Of the dozen performers, it’s interesting to note that the strongest, most welcome presence is that of the man quietly controlling everything, onscreen and off. Malhalkov himself plays the jury’s foreman, his large, round shoulders and philosopher’s beard rendering him a grounding force at the head of long table. His character holds a trump card close to this chest until the stretch, a tricky surprise alteration on the original film that’s a curious commentary on the filmmakers’ lack of faith in the Russian legal system and social mores, though it is finally of little consequence with regards to where our story finally falls.