The Cousin

Chabrol has already used the Cousins title so Israeli writer/director Tzahi Grad has the singular here. 
     But the film anatomizes both cousin races that grew out of Abraham, Hagar’s Arab and Sarah’s Jew, here Fahed and Naftali respectively. This is not about just the Palestinian’s suspect virtue but equally about the Jew’s. Each cousin has the Other to suffer the differences of and to reaccept as connected.

Naftali and wife Yael are liberal Jewish professionals. He’s made an animated film promoting biracial understanding and proposes a prime time TV series in which Palestinian-Jewish discussion might lead to better understanding and — oh, if only —peace.

Fahed is a rap singer as well a renovator, and proves a dab hand at computers too. His very range of skills makes him suspect, though, especially when his electrical error causes a frightening blackout. His dutifully anti-Israel lyrics don’t strengthen his case.

This Israeli and this Arab are as likely to get along as any. But the realities of Israeli life don’t make that easy. 

The scene where Naftali tries to pick up the Arab laborer he has booked bristles with deception and suspicion. One gets into the car claiming to be who he’s not. He swears at Naftali when he’s ordered out. The right man gets in, but he’s not quite right either.  He’s not the Sayeed that Naftali booked — who’s with his hospitalized wife — but his brother and coworker Fahed. 

When a girl is assaulted nearby, suspicion immediately falls on the Arab laborer. Despite Naftali’s skepticism, the charge gathers its own momentum. Fahed has to keep explaining himself, but suspicions grow. He never does produce the note he claimed to have left Naftali. He pops up and he disappears unsettlingly.

At first Naftali is confident enough to stand the suspect’s bail, to protect him from the inquisitive neighbours, and even to ward off wife Yael’s growing fear and anger at the possibly dangerous stranger’s intrusion into her home. 

But Naftali’s confidence weakens under Fahed’s innocent/suspicious behaviour, the neighborhood lynch mob’s invasion and the injured Yael’s decision to leave him. Grad develops the suspicions so carefully that we grow as uncertain as Naftali. 

But liberal values ultimately triumph. Naftali grabs a pistol to stop the assault on Fahed. He also draws out the girl’s unwilling identification of her assailant. Yael realizes her impractically idealistic husband was right all along, even heroic, so she takes him back.

  That sentimental conclusion is short-lived. In that charged situation even consequences have consequences. 

  The police arrest Naftali for injuring his wife, despite her denials, and for his liberties with the Jewish merchant’s loudspeaker and the soldier’s pistol. No good deed goes unpunished. Of course, Fahed disappears in the melee yet again. 
     The last shot turns the conclusion Absurd. A dramatic god’s-eye-view catches the scampering people in their frenzy of confusion, arrest, evasion, recapture, shrinking them to ants and their passions to trivia. The tensions and suspicions that loomed so large through the plot here disappear. This high-angle shot implicitly concludes: “What fools these mortals be.”
      Here's a parting irony: Naftali's TV proposal is rejected because it's assumed nobody will want to watch a weekly discussion between a Jew and a Palestinian, as they negotiate an understanding. But this film is itself the kind of thing they might watch, a gripping narrative in which both Jew and Arab fall under suspicion on the way to an embracing truth. A responsible fiction can be more constructive than a reasserted conviction.