Hanna K., Costa-Gavras's latest film, proposes nothing less than an original depiction of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict in terms that compromise neither the conflict's historical depth and ideological complexity nor, I think, his audience's sensibility. As a political as well as cinematic intervention, then Hanna K. is a statement of great and, I believe, lasting significance. The strength of its political message overrides its aesthetic problems, which will certainly be singled out for more invidious criticism than his earlier films.
As a maker of strong, well-crafted films on topical political subjects, Costa-Gavras is nevertheless unique for having enjoyed considerable commercial success. Even though no one else took on the relatively difficult and potentially unpleasant task of exposing various tyrannies around the globe in a consecutive, almost relentless series of films, his works nevertheless spoke sympathetically to a large number of Americans who discovered that they had no great stake in Greek colonels, Latin American dictatorships, or Soviet-bloc regimes. His gift for arousing the audience's sense of righteous anger, his technical skill in causing a film to hurtle forward like a great engine, plus his talent for humanizing, perhaps even enlivening, political issues that seemed to be becoming matters of indifference – these are the hallmarks of a style he has perfected over the past 15 years.
Even if Costa-Gavras's Missing flirted brazenly with its audience's displeasure by openly indicting U.S. complicity in the 1973 Chilean coup, Hanna K., as we can see by its plot, is an altogether more ambitious – and politically hazardous – enterprise.
Hanna Kaufman (Jill Clayburgh) is an American-Jewish immigrant in Israel, the child of Holocaust survivors. Petulant, headstrong, intelligent, she is a court-appointed lawyer assigned to defend a Palestinian – Salim Bakri – accused of terrorism and infiltration, whose plea is based on the claim the he is trying to regain possession of his family house. Hanna succeeds in saving him from jail, but as a result he is deported to Jordan. In the meantime Hanna's personal life (never well integrated into the film) takes over centerstage. Her affair with a rather grim and exceedingly astringent district attorney (Joshua Herzog, played brilliantly by the Irish actor Gabriel Byrne) is going nowhere, although she is about to have his child. She is separated from her French husband, Victor, to whom she is still attached, even though she's had a number of affairs since their estrangement. Then, Salim returns again, and from prison asks for her legal services: he is charged with illegal immigration. Reluctantly at first, she starts to investigate his story and discovers that his family house remains standing, a tourist attraction in Kfar Rimon, a settlement built and lived in by Russian Jews. Salim's village, Kufr Rumaneh, has disappeared except for a few stones and trees pointed out by an old Palestinian man.
The case comes to a head when the state's attorneys offer Hanna a deal on Salim: drop the proceedings and we'll arrange for him to become a South African citizen; then he can return to Israel and try to get his property back. This offer is made in the film's pivotal scene, and Hanna is forced to confront the fact that the legacy of the Holocaust has caused the dispossession of another people. The argument is that Israel must be defended even if the Palestinians are denied their rights. Her case lost, Hanna has her baby, and proceeds with her fitful, basically unfulfilled life. At little David's briss her friend, Amnon the prison doctor, informs her that Salim is starving himself in jail, and once more has asked for her. Near death, he is released into her custody. Joshua is both jealous and suspicious of the pair, as Hanna nurses Salim back to health. For his part, Salim ("a terrorist babysitter") care for her child whom he calls Omar, even while Hanna continues to feel uncertain about Salim's still obscure political intentions, his strange comings and goings, his often cold reticence.
Following him about in secret, she tracks him down to a deserted refugee camp where he had lived as a child with [his family]†. At that point she understands his human as well as political plight; shortly thereafter they become lovers. The film concludes with Joshua accusing Salim of a bombing at Kfar Rimon, which in turn prompts Salim to flee Hanna's house. A large squad of police arrives at the house to be greeted only by Hanna's shocked and terrified silence.
No synopsis can convey the understated power in many of the film's scenes, its small details, and its devastating political accuracy. I hasten to add, however, that I saw it as someone directly engaged in the subject, which didn't prevent me from noticing the script's occasional flatness, or Clayburgh's scattered performance (she's basically miscast, I think). Costa-Gavras doesn't seem to have missed very much that is essential, including Israel's real social and military power, the fact that such a film as this could have been made there (an not, say, in any Arab country), the truth that it is Israelis like Hanna, Amnon, and yes, even the unyielding Joshua, who will ultimately play crucial roles if there is to be any reconciliation between Arabs and Jews.
Hardly anyone in the film speaks as a mouthpiece for governmental or institutional policy; instead, positions are taken on human, existential grounds, on the basis of lived experience, not on purely ideological and rhetorical principles. Salim wants his house back, not a UN resolution, or the implementation of the Palestinian National Charter. Hanna is not modeled on (and doesn't really resemble) Felicia Langer or Lea Tsemel, two Israeli lawyers who have earned international reputations for defending Palestinians in Israeli courts: she is much too untidy, her personal life too intrusive with its various unresolved emotional entanglements, her political views too impulsive and ill-formed to be like the other two, given that both belong to organized left parties and act out of far stricter imperatives than her.
And still, the underlying actualities come through strongly enough. The opening scene, in which Salim is discovered hiding in a well ("He's probably pissed in it," says an Israeli soldier concerned that the Arab villagers' water supply may be polluted. "They're used to it," replies his comrade.), concludes with women and children dragging miscellaneous belongings out of their house just before an Israeli soldier exits, unrolling the wire that connects the house to a detonator which, when pressed, blows up the house. The peasants, whose dwelling happens to have been used for shelter by Salim and four other infiltrators, watch the destruction of their world with the mute suffering and tacit resistance of all unjustly oppressed people who will live on despite extraordinary hardship. Salim Bakri is acted by Mohammed Bakri, a Palestinian member of an Israeli theatrical group, and he is as authentic in his accent, his strangely quiet and yet smoldering presence, as his narrative is. We learn that Salim was driven out of Kufr Rumaneh with his family, lived in a desolate West Bank refugee camp, then in another camp in Beirut where his mother was killed by Israeli bombs. Of these enforced peregrinations, Joshua says piously that they were designed to save Palestinians from the fighting, to which Hanna retorts sarcastically that such safety has caused massacres and all but killed Salim. In court, Salim's presence coaxes the observation out of Hanna that since he has no passport, is a citizen of no country, maybe he doesn't exist at all. For his part, he has lived the itinerant and tenacious life of an exile, and without dressing it up at all, Costa-Gavras – quite literally for the first time in any European or American feature film – allows us to witness the Palestinian quandary as narratable human history. It is this, I suspect, that will turn many people away from the film.
But, as I said, the film's numerous local details are deeply affecting. A long line waiting outside an Israeli prison is made up entirely of Arabs; Hanna and her friend Amnon, don't have to wait, they can walk right in. Salim is either seen in custody, or as Hanna's ward. Palestinians walk, or they are driven; mostly with one or two exceptions, they don't speak. Soldiers are everywhere – on the beach, on the roads, at the entrance of mosques, in the old city. "Shalom," Victor says with unconscious irony to an Israeli soldier who like most of the Israelis in the film has "terrorists" on his mind, at the same time that the subjugation of unarmed Palestinians is overlooked as a negligible detail. Yet all of these things are subordinated by Costa-Gavras not only to the frequently unacknowledged humanencounters that occur in "The Holy Land," but also to the moral dilemma of what it means for one people to deny the equality of another on a land where even though they both have national claims, only one people has actually realized them.
This achievement is all the more remarkable when we recall that mass culture has, in fact, accepted the notion that whereas there may be a Palestine question and even Palestinians, neither has much positive human value attached to it. Israelis, in contrast, are still open, democratic, pioneering, etc., despite everything they do: given a large-scale U.S. investment in Israel, the natural ties between American Jews and Israelis, the immensely sophisticated Israeli public relations and lobbying apparatus, most Americans as a result can identify with Israelis as a people, and with individual Israelis as human beings. In itself, of course, such a view of "the Other" is eminently to be sought for but, as with all cultural politics, something else is being simultaneously suppressed. In this instance, it is the Palestinian who has never emerged with a full human and political identity, partly because of "terrorism" (which has allowed the Israelis, quite literally, to get away with murder in a manner so disproportionate with Palestinian violence as to make many Israelis – American supporters of Israel do not have as many qualms for the most part – deeply uncomfortable), partly because Palestinian culture itself is non-Western, largely Islamic, difficult to get at.
In addition, because there is so strong a fear of appearing critical of Israel, most publishers and media-managers stay away from Palestinian subjects even, for example, when it is a matter of translating Palestinian literature, exhibiting Palestinian art, publishing picture of Palestinians and so forth. As a small index of this, Emile Habiby's novel, The Pessoptimist, which is by any standards one of the major narrative works of the modern ironic imagination, was translated and published by a small and, I think, cosmetic press; it has been reviewed not at all, and no significant notice was taken of it. Mahmoud Darwish, who is one of the greatest poets alive, is represented in English translation by a handful of occasionally published pieces. The same is true of many other writers, artists, filmmakers, who suffer the pain of anonymity silently and invisibly.
The point is, therefore, that Palestinians do not, except rarely, represent themselves, and have to be represented within other, usually politically unfavorable perspectives. Mass-market Western films are almost entirely a wasteland as far as Arabs in general, Palestinians in particular, are concerned. The one extraordinary exception, of course, is The Battle of Algiers. In the main, however, there are either mythologized Israelis (Exodus, Cast a Giant Shadow, all the Old Testament epics) or there are all those Arabs fromThief of Bagdad to The Sheik and Lawrence of Arabia, to the terrorists of Black Sunday who contribute to a dehumanization whose political correlative is continuing dispossession and oppression for the Palestinians. Even John Le Carré's Little Drummer Girl, which tires to capture the Palestinian plight sympathetically, and for all that it was attacked by the Israeli lobby, still represents the Palestinian as someone seen only through Israeli eyes as a terrorist; it too is being filmed in Israel.
In such a dismal setting, to which must be added the enormous mass of TV news featuring "Moslem gunners" versus U.S. marines in Lebanon, a national policy which has absolved itself of any responsibility either for the massacres at Sabra and Shatila or for the colonization of the West Bank, a presidential campaign whose most predictible and indecent rhetoric concerns unqualified support for Israel (a campaign joined in a big way by the space cadet from Ohio), Costa-Gavras's Hanna K. appears like a stunning flash of lightning. Such a film could only have been made by Europeans, since the consensus on Palestinians there is much closer to the international view than it is to the U.S.-South African one.
Salim Bakri, the Palestinian in the film, is a Palestinian so forcefully as to lift the level of the film from that of a dispiriting and finally trivial love story to that of a political argument. Like Melville's Bartelby, he seems to be saying, "deal with me if you can, but I most certainly would prefer not to go away." No, Salim is not all Palestinians, he is not a militant, he is not the forces of history. He is one Palestinian whose basic drive concerns his house, his life, his destiny. That Costa-Gavras has built a film around these concerns is, in the current aesthetic and socio-political setting, an act of profoundly courageous human and political solidarity. For Hanna K. to accomplish its real mission, however, it must open further discussion and debate. But alas, that may not be allow moviegoers who may not get a chance to see the film if, for political reasons, it is either closed quickly or nor widely shown.
