Saeed Refuses to Smile

By Elen Ghulam

I am reminded of the game my husband and I play when I am mad at him.

I will put on my longest most serious face, and he will do everything in his power to make me smile.

Funny faces, jokes, tickles, he knows that once I smile I won't be able to pretend that I am mad at him anymore. When all else fails, he will say:

husband: Don't be like that.
Elen: like what?
husband: Like a grumpy person who won't smile even when he is presented with warm freshly baked bread.

The last statement always conjures up in my mind my husband's stories about how his mother always got up at 5 am every morning to bake fresh bread for the whole family.

Every Palestinian man seems to have a story about how his mother sacrificed herself in hopes that he would have a better life.

It must have been nice to get freshly baked bread every single morning. Only a true grump would not find a reason to smile.

These thoughts play in my mind as I conjure up the movie Paradise Now that I watched during the Vancouver International Film Festival, which recently won a Golden Globe award for best foreign language movie.

Saeed is asked to smile by a photographer. The photographer insists, Saeed persists in his refusal to smile. Meet Saeed, a young man living in Nablus in the occupied territories.

Ironically, Saeed means happy in Arabic.

While I spent time in occupied territories, I could always tell the difference between the locals and the foreigners; the ones that grew up there and the ones that were visiting. The local ones rarely, if ever smiled. The ones visiting from abroad smiled liberally, when greeting you, when saying goodbye, when talking about something funny and for no reason at all.

Meet Suha, she smiles lots. Guess what? She grew up in France. People are nice to her because she is the daughter of a martyr and a hero, also she is cute.

In a Hollywood movie, Suha would make Saeed smile by the end of the movie; at one point you think that surely the movie is going in that direction.

So many similarities with a Hollywood movie

There is a cute leading female.
Two guys dressed in black suits, which reminded me of the Men In Black movie and the Blues Brothers movie.
Suspense.

One quarter into the movie the suspense was so high, that my friend who came to see the movie with me looked like she had stopped breathing. I offered to hold her hand. For about five minutes we both forgot about the north American rule that females are not supposed to hold hands in public and behaved like we would in the middle east despite the fact that my friend is not middle eastern, we held hands. She looked at me and whispered, you must find this even more distressing than I do, I nodded with my head to say that I am ok. I wanted to tell her that everything in this movie is familiar, the language, the mentality, the way people talk, I have seen it all before, only in real life. It must be distressing to be exposed to all this within 15 minutes.

My favorite scene in the Blues Brothers is when they are going around looking for the other members of their band and they go into a diner to recruit Aretha Franklin’s husband Matt.

Matt: Oh man. Don't talk that way round here. My old lady, she'll kill me.
Elwood: Ma'am you gotta understand that this is a lot bigger than any domestic problems you might be experiencing.
Aretha: Matt, what the hell is he talking about?
Matt: Don't get roused sugar.
Aretha: Don't you "Don't get roused sugar" me! Now you not going back on the road no more, and you ain't playing no more two bit sleazy dives. You're living with me now, and you're not gonna go sliding around with you old white hoodlum friends.
Matt: But babe, this is Jake and Elwood. The Blues Brothers.
Aretha: The Blues Brothers! Shit, they still owe you money, fool!
Jake: Ma'am, would it make you feel any better if you knew that what we asking Matt here to do was a holy thing?
Elwood: You see, we're on a mission from God.

That scene cracks me up each time I see it.

Saeed and his friend are not sure if they are on a mission from god or not. When they discuss the nature of their mission, they don't seem sure if god is behind it. You wish they were religious crazy fanatics on a mission from god. That is the lie that we have been told in western media, time and again ... surprise! .. they are not. Religion plays a role ... but a very small role in the events that are about to take place.

Paradise Now is not a Hollywood movie

No happy ending
No violence
No car chase scene
No sex
One small brief episode of swearing and it is very brief indeed

As I watched the movie, I wished I could have reach out to Saeed to shake his shoulder. I wished I could tell him, "Saeed! you are young and beautiful, your whole life is ahead of you, don't throw it away". Suha tries hard to play the audience voice in that movie. She even speaks Arabic with a funny accent to mark her foreignness and out-sidedness. She is treated with polite decorum, but nothing she says seems to address the realities on the ground. She is there in person, but far removed at the same time.

When the movie ended there was complete silence in the whole movie theatre. You could have heard a pin drop. In most movies, you can hear the tidbits of conversation about the movie as you walk out. Again, as we walked out, there was complete and stunned silence. Nobody was saying anything, not even to their mobile phone. Everybody was completely and utterly stunned by the movie and so overwhelmed with what they just saw they were speechless.

I had seen several movies at this year’s International Film Festival, not as many as I would have liked to because I was busy with other things. But this movie made the International Festival for me. After I watched it, I had no desire to see any more movies; this one will live with me for a long time.

In short, Paradise Now is absolutely brilliant. If you are planning to see it, prepare to see a truly thought provoking movie that will rock your world.

Elen Ghulam is a computer programmer, an activist and writer/publisher of the blog site www.ihath.com. She lives in Vancouver, Canada with her family