Paradise Now is about two likable, 20-something Palestinian losers who get tapped for a suicide bombing mission in Tel Aviv. The film won the Golden Globe for best foreign film.
The Globe and Mail's Mark McKinnon watched it in a Jerusalem movie theatre. Needless to say, the protagonists weren't being rooted on:
Some excerpts:
Going to see Paradise Now in a Jerusalem movie theatre is an experience that starts to get uncomfortable before you even reach the box office.
As soon as you arrive at the door of the Jerusalem Cinematheque, you're reminded of how close to home the award-winning film about would-be Palestinian suicide bombers is about to get. A young woman asks you to open your coat so she can give your body a once-over with her hand-held metal detector. Another guard, an older man carrying a pistol, watches the process carefully, ready to confront anyone who seems suspicious.
While Paradise Now -- which won a Golden Globe this week as best foreign-language film -- is an exploration of what motivates young Palestinians to consider becoming suicide bombers, Jerusalem is the other side of its story.
It is a city scarred by the effects of such attacks, a place where you line up to have your bags searched before you line up for popcorn. ...
The tension finally broke toward the end as Said, who had wavered throughout the film about whether or not he would actually carry out his assignment, decided he had no other option. He laid the blame for his decision squarely on Israel and its 39-year-old occupation of the West Bank: "They left me no choice but to be the murderer and the murdered at the same time," he says near the end of his angry soliloquy.
For some in the audience, emotions that had bubbled below the surface all evening finally boiled over. "It's a shame to show this in Israel!" shouted a woman in a wool-knit cap sitting at the back of the theatre. "This film helps the murderers, the terrorists!"
When others in the audience loudly shushed her, she yelled back that her child had been killed in a suicide bombing. Continuing her shrill protest for several long minutes, she was joined by others in her shouting. Anxious ushers eventually calmed the situation, but the audience's mood had already slid from disquieted to something that seemed to border more on depressed.
Many sat slumped in their chairs long after the movie ended, several holding their heads in their hands as if dismayed by the movie, the yelling match, or both. A group of young Arab men I'd seen come in just before the movie started -- I noticed them because they seemed to the only Arabs in the theatre -- left before the houselights went up.