Sadly Over-hyped

Better Late Then Never

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Based on a novel by Yasmina Khadra, Lebanese director Ziad Douiere's The Attack is about a man without a country. Unlike Philip Nolan in Edward Everett Hale's classic novella who has been exiled from his country forever, however, Dr. Amin Jafaari (Ali Suliman), a respected Israeli Arab doctor, never had a country to begin with. The film, about a man whose life is turned upside down in the course of a single moment, is a gripping suspense thriller, an intimate love story, a poignant personal drama, and a powerful political statement. What it adds up to is superior entertainment. Unfortunately, the film has been banned by the Arab League for the crime of filming in Israel, limiting its potential to reach a bigger audience.The film opens with Dr. Jafaari delivering his acceptance speech at a prestigious medical conference where he has been honored as the first Arab ever to receive an important medical award. Oddly, his wife Siham (Reymond Amselem) is visiting relatives in Nazareth and is not with him to celebrate the apex of his career. Before going on stage, he receives a call from Siham but tells her that he cannot talk and will call her later. That is the last time that he will ever hear her voice. The next day, while at the hospital, Amin hears a loud explosion and knows from experience that a suicide bombing has taken place and will bring many injured and dying victims to the hospital.Dr. Jafaari, who has always treated both Arabs and Israelis, works feverishly to save as many lives as possible, even though a Jewish victim refuses to be treated by an Arab and spits in his face. Amin's world of safety and respect is torn apart when he learns that his wife may be the suicide bomber responsible for the death of 17 people including 11 children. Arrested and mercilessly grilled by a relentless Israel Intelligence officer (Uri Gavriel), he is told that the bomber has been positively identified by forensic evidence as his wife but he is in denial. It is only after he receives a letter from Siham in which she tells him not to hate her that he becomes convinced of the impossible.The letter is mailed from Nablus, a Palestinian city on the West Bank, but Amin withholds the information from his friend Raveed (Dvir Benedek), a high-ranked police officer. Provided sanctuary by Kim Yehuda (Evgenia Dodina), a Russian colleague, Amin is distraught by the realization that his wife of fifteen years had a secret life that she never shared with him. Mirroring Denis Villeneuve's 2010 film Incendies, he travels to Nablus at great personal risk to trace the roots of Siham's involvement, questioning family and friends to find answers. As Amin seeks out those responsible, he is told by his nephew Adel (Karim Saleh) who was deeply involved, "Something snapped in her head," and by Sheik Marwan (Ramzi Makdessi) that he has no business there and to return to Tel Aviv before he brings the Israeli Intelligence down on his people (why Israeli intelligence did not follow him to Nablus is not explained).An Arab leader in the Christian church tells him, "We're not Islamists and we're not fundamentalists, either. We are only the children of a ravaged, despised people, fighting with whatever means we can to recover our homeland and our dignity," and adds, "I never met your wife," the priest declares, "I wish I had." When Amin learns that Sahim is considered a hero and a martyr with her picture posted all over the city, he begins to feel trapped between his loyalty to the Arab cause and to his Israeli colleagues who opened so many doors for him and his wife. Visiting the rubble of Jenin, a Palestinian refugee camp that was bombed by the Israelis, he starts to sense the anger behind his wife's radicalization.Doueiri presents a balanced picture of the feelings on both sides, and The Attack is not a propaganda film. Although it is about the seemingly impassable political divide that separates the Israeli and Arab worlds, the film is basically a look at the human cost of the conflict. A sensitive and poetic story of the love between two people shown in flashbacks, the film asks the question – can we ever really know another person, even those we have been intimate with for many years? Can we ever know what goes on in the deepest layer of their being, how they "sense" the world? Can we even know ourselves, who we really are? For Amin, who must put the pieces of his life back together, there are many questions, but few answers, only emotional scars that will last a lifetime.

Everything about this movie was terrible. *Everything*: the dry acting, the lifeless script, the vision-free direction, the boring cinematography... the score was particularly dreadful. The pacing was painful--it was impossible to determine at any point how far into the film you were or how much time remained. How on earth one can take a premise like this and make such a dreadfully boring movie is beyond me. I don't know whether the book is told in flashback like the film but I can't imagine it worked there, either. My advice to the filmmakers on their future work: don't try and answer questions with your film; instead, raise questions that can't be answered. If I wasn't with a friend, I would have walked out. Afterward, I found out she felt likewise. Painful viewing.

"Who knows the secrets of the human heart?" The Crying Game.Three tales comprise this simple, beautiful, and harrowing drama of a Palestinian doctor, Ali Suliman (Amin Jaafari), working in Tel Aviv and receiving the equivalent of the Israeli "medical Oscar." What a fine metaphor, you say, of hope for peace between these warring peoples! Yes, but why is his wife, Siham (Reymond Amsalem), not there to share in his finest professional moment? The Attack is first of all about a terrorist act, for she is preparing to become a Palestinian martyr at the expense of 17 Tel Aviv civilians' lives and numerous maimed women and children. The reality of this tale is that such attacks are common but not so easily explained except that two populations hate each other enough to commit mayhem the reason for which no one can really understand beyond the obvious territoriality.Second, it's an attack on the brilliant doctor's understanding of human nature as he assesses how he knew nothing for their 15 married years about what would lead her to become a suicide bomber. In thematic terms, the fathomless mystery lives on about how well we know those closest to us (see opening quote) and by extension, how well the Israelis and Palestinians know each other.Third, The Attack is about understanding the wall between Israel and Palestine that makes collaboration such as in the opening medical award scene a fantasy for two peoples in a terrorist state of mind. Slowly the film allows the hatred and suspicion to seep into each frame with a subtlety so graceful as almost to be unseen and unfelt. Never does the film descend into melodrama or hysteria.The Attack is an understated masterpiece focusing on the emerging awareness of a doctor that the violence he tends to in the hospital is closer at home, but he learns too late. That is probably the most effective part of Lebanese writer/director Ziad Doueiri's vision: We can't understand terror in part because it hides itself until it explodes on the scene.Although the Arab League asked for a boycott of the film because the director violated a Lebanese policy forbidding work by its citizens in Israel, the league may have missed the film's somewhat benign treatment of Siham and her cause. Truth be told, though, neither Israel nor Palestine is the bad team in this film. Rather, the bad is the ignorance that fosters violence in the name of liberty. Such a lack of awareness assures there will always be attacks.The only hope I found is in Screen Comment's final assessment of the film itself as an emblem of cooperation: "Witness the coming together of a crew as talented, as diverse and as honest as that of 'The Attack,' bringing us this unflinching testimony of a situation to which the world has unfortunately become inured but which will have to find a solution some day."

A very beautiful, sensitive and poignant movie I watched today. I already knew the topic, and that is the reason why I got to it. I don't know much about Israeli or Palestinian movie industry...And I guess there are many films like this one. The story has been told above, in the plot line. A very simple but unusual tale. The search of the widower about the death of his wife, suspected to have been a kamikaze human bomb in Tel Aviv, killing a bunch of innocent folks. You can't stay cold in front of this poor man searching, seeking for the truth and then facing it, with all the pain that means for him. The final moments, in the last sequence, is absolutely terrific. A film that you have to watch only if you are in the mood for it. Yes, you have to be prepared. Somewhere a depressing story, but so beautiful in the same time.