Let It Be Morning

As in his The Band’s Visit, Israeli director Eran Kolirin uses a small incident to dramatize the Jewish-Arab tension in Israel. The present focus is entirely upon the Palestine community, as a small Christian Arab Israeli village suffers a brief military enclosure. No reasons are given for the Israelis’ defensive/offensive restrictive posture.

Hero Sami has returned to his family for his young brother’s wedding. The army’s restriction costs him his important job at a Jerusalem computer company — and keeps him from his enchanting Jewish mistress there. His brother’s unease in his own new marriage echoes Sami’s wife’s sensitivity to Sami’s detachment.  

Sami’s father has an Old School conviction that the Palestinians should massively rebel against the Israeli outpost. They would incur a few deaths but would prevail. He also tries to protect the illegal workers -- the daffawi, illegals from the West Bank -- he has building a house for Sami there. 

When one citizen tries to drive through their blockade the Israelis shoot down his car. The driver returns, bandaged, at the end for the funeral of the Palestinian cabbie who was killed by the panicking young Israeli guard.

The local council is a corrupt gang that bullies the citizens and seems to be serving the Israelis by trying to weed out the undocumented workers. The thug leader torments the cabbie about his betraying wife and has the cabbie’s cab burned when he fails to repay the loan he bought it with. Following the threat just to seize the cab this arson casts a pall of irrational self-destruction upon the community.

In dramatizing the Palestinians’ plight the film presents only one Jew, that young guard who is a sad case of soldier. In the early crossing scene the other Israeli soldiers are polite, efficient. But the young man -- an example of the sentimental Left --  twice absently  leaves his gun loose for seizing and is prone to sleep while on watch. Yet his sympathy for Sami, his older brother’s schoolmate, allows him some privilege — which only frustrates Sami more.   

The gang leader also shows a soft spot for Sami, which may — or may not — be due to their sexual experimentation as kids. After his wife reveals her knowledge of his infidelity Sami revives his marriage, perhaps resigning himself to staying with his father and wife and abandoning his Jerusalem liberty.

After this dark night of the community soul the film ends ambiguously on the eponymous -- and Genesis -- morning. The newspaper delivery man connotes the reopening of the road. After the cabbie’s funeral the whole community marches to the border to find the Israeli guards gone.  

And here is the ambiguity. Does the community’s march mean they are finally moved to collectively resist the Israeli restrictions or are they acceding to their control?

The answer may lie in the frame provided by the opening and closing scenes, with their antithetical bird’s eye views. The film opens with a tracking shot through the wedding reception from behind white vertical bars. This turns out to be the perspective of the white pigeons who are supposed to fly off at the end of the ceremony. 

But they don’t. They don’t want to leave their cage. Even when shaken out they refuse to fly. In a later scene Sami’s wife and son try to teach the pigeons to fly but they refuse. The boy and one by one his parents throw stones at the cat attacking one and at the birds who refuse to escape. 

In the high angle (aka bird’s eye view) closing shot we see the townspeople staring at the newly opened gate, but not moving. If they had decided to move en masse it's too late. Like the cabbie's wife showing her feelings at his funeral, too late. Like the birds, the villagers prefer the discomfort and frustration of being caged over the opportunity — and danger — of escape.  

The open end allows space for the viewer’s political choice. What would these Palestinians' flying free be? Resuming the century-long attack against the Jews or abandoning the "resistance" to enjoy the opportunities of collaborating with the Jews, as represented by Sami's lost job and his "amazing" Jewish mistress?