by Stephen Applebaum- the national,ae
Words can hurt and words can heal. In the Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueiri’s thrilling new courtroom drama, The Insult, they do both. The film grew out of a real incident three years ago involving Doueiri, what he calls his “hurtful mouth”. It digs into the sectarian religious and political fault lines that still exist in Lebanon, almost 30 years after the end of the country’s bloody civil war. Talking last week during the Venice Film Festival, where The Insult is competing for the Golden Lion, Doueiri recalls watering plants on a balcony in Beirut when someone swore at him from the street below. “I leaned over the balcony and said, ‘Why are you insulting me?’ and he said, ‘Because your water’s falling on me.’ I noticed from his accent that he was Palestinian and I said what you should never say to a Palestinian … I wanted to hurt him as much as possible, and I succeeded.”
Doueiri apologised – “He couldn’t even look me in the eye. He was very, very hurt”. In the film, his words (unprintable here) are spat out by Toni (Adel Karam), a Lebanese right-wing Christian car mechanic, towards Yasser (Kamel El Basha), a Palestinian construction worker who fixed his illegal water pipe, after the Palestinian refuses to apologise for insulting him. There follows an escalating argument that begins verbally, then turns physically violent and ends up in court as a case that grips the public, explosively splitting opinion along lines that expose the simmering tensions in Lebanese society. “In the Middle East, you know how we are,” says Doueiri. “We are like a powder-keg, waiting for a small spark.” The filmmaker and his co-writer, Joelle Touma, were going through a divorce while writing the film, which no doubt helped give a sharpness and energy to the confrontations between the characters Toni and Yasser, and between their respective lawyers. The Insult doesn’t take sides, though, and like their previous film, The Attack, about the fall-out from a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, it shows great empathy by acknowledging the hurt and trauma that underlie its antagonists. This is impressive given Doueiri’s background.