LEMON TREE
a film review by Malik Isasis
I don’t know why I do it to myself. Going to see depressing, albeit excellent films that is. Maybe I should have went to see X-Men: Origins for a little escapism rather than a poor Palestinian woman fighting the military-industrial complex in Israel.
Lemon Tree is an Israeli film. Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis, and his co-screenwriter, Palestinian journalist Suha Arraf, straddles the absurdity that is the Middle East with tenderness and compassion. This film exposes the daily indignity, and quiet suffering of the Palestinians’ occupation more effectively than a year’s worth of reporting in the American media.
Lemon Tree is not an ethereal title; it is quite literal, as the female protagonist owns a lemon grove on the West Bank-Israeli border, which her father planted 50 years ago. The grove is a dense beautiful patchwork of green and yellow. When the wind blows the lemons fall to the earth, and every morning, Salma Zidane, a poor widowed Palestinian woman played to the bone by Haim Abbas goes out with her basket and retrieves the fallen fruit as she does so, she realizes that the new neighbors have moved in and brought a watchtower with them, which is erected in her lemon grove.
Her new neighbors are the Israeli Defense Minister and his wife. Soon after the new neighbors move in Salma receives a letter that is written in Hebrew, a language she does not speak. She takes the letter into town to a friend who reads the letter aloud. As she listens to the words, her face slowly begins to break down as she listens to her livelihood and heritage threaten in the name of Israel’s security.
Abbas is an attractive woman, but not in a traditional sense, she has a pedestrian beauty that sells her pain, and history. Abbas has perfected the quietly bereaved archetype; she played similar characters in the Syrian Bride, Satin Rouge, and The Visitor (she can now be seen in Jim Jarmusch’s new film Limits of Control, which I will be reviewing next week).
After receiving the letter from the military, she decides that she would not accept the outcome of the Israeli government cutting down the trees in her lemon grove. Her appeal reaches Israel’s Supreme Court, where the outcome is already scripted.
What makes this movie work is how it approaches Israel’s occupation of Palestinians through the struggle of one woman’s passion to keep her lemon grove. It is clear that Israel has evolved into a dispassionate, hypervigilent State were military decisions of aggression is seen as strength, rather than a weakness, because in the end, Israelis have imprisoned themselves behind the walls they’ve erected to keep out the terrorists.
Grade: A
a film review by Malik Isasis
I don’t know why I do it to myself. Going to see depressing, albeit excellent films that is. Maybe I should have went to see X-Men: Origins for a little escapism rather than a poor Palestinian woman fighting the military-industrial complex in Israel.
Lemon Tree is an Israeli film. Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis, and his co-screenwriter, Palestinian journalist Suha Arraf, straddles the absurdity that is the Middle East with tenderness and compassion. This film exposes the daily indignity, and quiet suffering of the Palestinians’ occupation more effectively than a year’s worth of reporting in the American media.
Lemon Tree is not an ethereal title; it is quite literal, as the female protagonist owns a lemon grove on the West Bank-Israeli border, which her father planted 50 years ago. The grove is a dense beautiful patchwork of green and yellow. When the wind blows the lemons fall to the earth, and every morning, Salma Zidane, a poor widowed Palestinian woman played to the bone by Haim Abbas goes out with her basket and retrieves the fallen fruit as she does so, she realizes that the new neighbors have moved in and brought a watchtower with them, which is erected in her lemon grove.
Her new neighbors are the Israeli Defense Minister and his wife. Soon after the new neighbors move in Salma receives a letter that is written in Hebrew, a language she does not speak. She takes the letter into town to a friend who reads the letter aloud. As she listens to the words, her face slowly begins to break down as she listens to her livelihood and heritage threaten in the name of Israel’s security.
Abbas is an attractive woman, but not in a traditional sense, she has a pedestrian beauty that sells her pain, and history. Abbas has perfected the quietly bereaved archetype; she played similar characters in the Syrian Bride, Satin Rouge, and The Visitor (she can now be seen in Jim Jarmusch’s new film Limits of Control, which I will be reviewing next week).
After receiving the letter from the military, she decides that she would not accept the outcome of the Israeli government cutting down the trees in her lemon grove. Her appeal reaches Israel’s Supreme Court, where the outcome is already scripted.
What makes this movie work is how it approaches Israel’s occupation of Palestinians through the struggle of one woman’s passion to keep her lemon grove. It is clear that Israel has evolved into a dispassionate, hypervigilent State were military decisions of aggression is seen as strength, rather than a weakness, because in the end, Israelis have imprisoned themselves behind the walls they’ve erected to keep out the terrorists.
Grade: A
posted by Malik Isasis at
2:09 AM
1 Comments:
One masterpiece. Really love this film.
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