Tel Aviv on Fire

In Ramallah a contemporary Palestinian TV crew produce a popular soap opera in which the characters set out to change the historic record of the Six Days War of 1967. A Parisian Arab star Tala plays a spy who goes undercover to seduce the Israeli commander, planning to steal his plans for Israel’s surprise attack. That war did not set Tel Aviv on fire but this popular TV drama would. 

This film is a light-handed but thoughtful examination of the myths and fictions that drive both sides in that conflicted area. The Israelis and the Palestinians cling to their respective histories, which define their present perceptions and impede their warmer human connections. 

This is most explicitly dramatized in the debate over whether the TV drama should conclude with a marriage between the spy and the Israeli general, now in love with each other. That would allow for another season of drama, salaries, and work, but at the cost of political integrity. Or will the bride blow up the (camouflaged church) synagogue? Spoiler alert: at least in this fiction the inner fiction opts for life over death. 

As in myths, the end is latent in the beginning. In an early scene the cast and writer argue over whether calling a beautiful woman “explosive” is romantic. For the scriptwriter explosive violence is beautiful. She leaves the project in protest at the Israeli-style kiss turning the film into "Zionist propaganda."In contrast, the makeup girl advances to an acting career, preferring to rise in the system. The conclusion provides an alternative explosion: real life explodes into the fiction when Captain Assi pops up in the TV show to arrest the wedding couple. This gives the show's cast and crew the possibility of an extended run on TV, another season, an afterlife without dying. 

The film centrally traces the maturing of the hero Salam, an unpromising fumbler who draws a menial salary by making coffee for his producer uncle, when he isn’t stumbling into sets. When Salam tells the border crossing captain Assi he’s a screenwriter his lie gradually turns into a truth. That’s what myths do. 

The Israeli drafts scenes for him, in hopes of impressing his wife, sister and mother, who are cross-culturally enrapt at the drama. The men's partnership cracks over the classic distinction between “terrorist” and “freedom fighter.”
      For all their mutual help Captain Assi’s seizure of Salam’s ID card is a harsh reminder of their imbalance in power and the danger beneath the present charm. There is genuine pathos in the adult Palestinians having to wait sheepishly in line at the border crossing, subject to the guards' whims. The scriptwriter's ardour for explosions tacitly explains why these crossing guards are necessary.  Perhaps in unconscious recognition of this, the outsider Assi tries to wriggle into the Palestinian's story first with his scenes, then with his picture, and finally exploding into the film himself as a deus ex machina.

As Salam gains confidence he starts attending to the conversations around him and his own feelings and impulses. That prompts him to write scenes himself. As he outgrows the Israeli captain's control he lives out the history of a colonized people growing into independence. As Israel did in 1948. Salam thus becomes an emblem for the possible future of the currently unfulfilled Palestinians.

His new talent and career also win him the girl he loves and earlier lost. He wins her by replaying on screen the sentiments he awkwardly tried to express in life. Art amends the failures in life, as the Palestinians hoped their ’67 war rewrite would do. 
      The TV show's melodramatic tone and especially the sequel's repetition of the cigarette-light pickup line. establish the show as a conventional genre drama. That is, the story is constructed out of a very familiar set of repeated plot elements, m character types, settings, even dialogue. Genre films work on the understanding that the elements are very familiar, repeated over decades, with the director flashing his style and character in how he inflects those familiar, even hackneyed, conventions. 
       The point here is that repeating the same narrative may work in popular fiction -- indeed it propels the various genres -- but it doesn't work in life.  The political lesson here is that if your life repeats the old story then you don’t escape the plot. And when the old plot isn't working —e.g., suicides/deaths without progress since 1947 — maybe you need a new narrative. The genrefication of life is like the first screenwriter's aestheticizing of terrorist violence. 
       Captain Assi transcends his joyless job by breaking out of that plot and becoming a TV star. Salam breaks out of his plot of the loser Palestinian by reshaping the narrative of his life instead of plodding on it. The wardrobe girl rewrites her plot to be a star instead of dressing others. The film’s central thrust is to escape the genre narrative of terrorism (the scriptwriter’s belief that beauty can be explosive, or vice versa) and to rewrite the narrative of their life to allow growth, progress, readjusting the political reality, learning from the “occupier” and bringing him into their narrative.   

Here's a side-joke. Captain Assi initially requires Salem to bring him the esteemed Palestinian hummous. Here the drama alludes to the fervid debate over who invented that delicacy, Israel or the Palestinians. Here it’s advantage Palestine as Assi rhapsodizes over a junk hummous Salam concocts out of canned hummous long past its shelf life. For the men’s climactic reconciliation Salem brings him to the best.   
       Both warring cultures in the audience may bristle at the odd line, or find a historic nit to pick. But the overall warmth and charm should prevail. Among the various international  sources of funding for this project, the Israeli government’s film support looms significant.