Film Review: ´The Insult' by Ziad Doueri

Ziad Doueri’s (The Attack, 2013) is a trivial piece of Lebanese amuse-bouche mez-mez that uses serious recent political history in the Levant as a pretext for a talky, on-the-nose, contrived personal project. The Insult never manages to transcend its origins as a script idea rthat sprang from an incident the director had three years ago with a Palestinian worker in Beirut.  According to Doueri, who personally attended The Insult’s Gouna Film Festival screening at the Marina Theater on Sunday night, this film was co-written with someone whom he was in the middle of divorcing at the time. As the director explained after the screening, he and his co-scriptwriter were on opposite sides of the political spectrum, yet chose to switch sides and pen the dialog of the characters that represented the antithesis of their personal beliefs. 

The setup for the movie unfolds when Tony (Adel Karam), an ill-mannered Christian hardass who exudes Bashir Gemayel-inspired Phalangist venom, takes exception to a Palestinian who fixes his balcony’s drainpipe. The Palestinian character is named, yes, Yasser (Kamel el Basha), and to compound the obviousness of a fluffy film that fails to punch above its middling heft, he turns out to be a survivor of the Jordanian nights of massacre of the refugee camps that was ordered by the allegedly CIA-lackey King Hussein in the early 70s. Western audiences for The Insult will quickly be lost in the various intricate backstories that are part and parcel of the history of the Arab world, including the ugly and extremely bloody Lebanese civil war and the crimes perpetrated by the Zionist butcher once known as El Safah against Palestinians in the 80s, on the outskirts of Beirut, in Sabra and elsewhere, as Lebanese Christians looked the other way. Ariel should have finished the job, says Tony as he locks horns with Yasser over the drainpipe episode, and it is this “insult” that subsequently leads to various heavy-handed kerfuffles involving broken ribs and prematurely born babies and precipitates a lengthy and wooden, overly-expository courtroom drama, dominated by an unlikely pairing of father and daughter barristers, representing each side of the conflict, which only highlights the artificiality and contrived nature of this film. 

After the movie was over, the floor was opened the floor for questions after a long and somewhat hyper, peacockish speech by the director himself. Unfortunately the first person called on was a pro-Palestinian speechifyer who droned on in elaborate Arabic about his issues with this movie, at which point the director of the Gouna Film Festival, Intishal Al Timimi, interceded with the statement that GFF takes no position on these sensitive and complex issues, and thus ended the Q&A with an abrupt thud. Despite Doueri’s relative youth, The Insult has nothing new to add to a very old problem, and instead opts to soapbox the enduring dilemma of a country that remains a powderkeg waiting to explode. But then, what else is new?  ~ aly