Miral
(dir. Julian Schnabel)
A level of expectation went into what Julian Schnabel would do when he announced his intentions to make a film about the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Past efforts and his incline of ratcheting up the filmmaking decibel to interrogate truth of difficult subject matter seemed to indicate personality and controversy may come to a head if Schnabel sight-lined a tenuous issue (like the strained Middle East dilemma) with the right amount of fervor. Time progressed after the announcement and when it came for Miral to finally debut, the film tracked up enough production mud to get delayed a few times and stunt momentum for any headlining world cinema controversy. The film also did something more off putting and disenchanting by skirting most controversial issues and going more down the social middle of the road with its story.
The good news is that there is much merit in what Schnabel does. Miral, an adaption of a novel by the same name from Rula Jebreal, is a fictional story about a historical situation of philanthropist Hindi Hussein and the results of her efforts in trying to create a school haven that would allow Palestinian girls to grow up in Israel without feeling any second class citizenry that came with the creation of Israel and disjointing of land around Jerusalem from locals nationalities already living there, namely the Palestinians. Because Hindi was a successful politician in swaying Israeli political interest, she maintained peace at her school for years. The story is history of characters involved with the school and how things came to a breaking point when Palestinian protests pushed for independence and a girl from Hindi’s school put both her family’s interest and the school’s by joining in on the political crusade.
The narrative of the story has a novel feeling of backtracking the history of the school and the main figure of Miral from the respective history of different characters and how their dramas shaped the events that revolve around later portions of the film. At the beginning Hindi Hussein finds herself accidentally helping out orphaned children. Subsequently, her housing means allows for a floodgate of more orphaned children. The accident turns into a cause. Years later, the narrative gets to know Miral’s mother and her unlikely chance of meeting her father while in prison. The story bends even more by telling how Miral got her namesake (named after a common flower on the side of the road) and how she grew to adapt Hindi as a second mother after her biological mother ended her life. The suicide does not have an immediate plot necessity to helping understand Miral herself, but it underpins many social dwellings. Many facts in the story have a sweeping curiosity that have no easy plot peg to fit into.
The eventual moral discussion is framed around the struggle for independence and acceptance of compromise by protesting Palestinians. For many Palestinians, it is not enough. The film registers their complaints on the faintest level. It directs the focus through Miral and the school and their safer desire to find peace. There is insuniation that Hindi wants peace but she also wants her school to be protected. When the agreement means that only 22% of the disputed land will be recovered, Hindi seems happy to go to her grave with that achievement. The dismal reality (supplied in a footnote) is that Israelis still have not given Palestinians even that, but the belief it will happen will be lasting solace for Hindi’s efforts. The nice notion of a contained independence being given a level of credence is controversial because it bow ties an enormous and ongoing argument with deep history into a smaller struggle. If I was going to rate Miral’s political deft, the film would flunk. However, I believe the film has an interesting level of apolitical morality and finds some interesting (and relevant) emotional strands by trying to be something else.
There is no reason to think Julian Schnabel short changes the novel. The slim work gets consistent criticism for being light on political issues, but what this story has going for it is an air of authenticity into a sidebar historical issue. As a biography of Miral until her early adulthood, the film is a tracking of how she was able to get the means to leave Israel and study with a full scholarship in Italy. The thanks is to Hindi Hussein and her school, but since both had unique ways of both coming into existence and finding each other, the narrative relies on anecdotal quirks to detail how both could evolve in the same universe. Unlike Slumdog Millionaire (2008), the quirky facts are not friendly for a clever plot construction. They just exist and conclusion does not find most stories or characters in the film. The only story in Miral with solid beginning and end is Hindi Hussein herself. Whatever size her school has in the region’s bigger political picture, the validation of doing what she did is still a rational dramatic stronghold. The result is the creation of a memorial work in the midst of a controversy.
An intimidating road to travel is to successfully navigate a difficult subject that has too many ends to cover. Topics and subjects have intimidated artists in various fields before. It does not even have to be an unresolved situation. Stanley Kubrick abandoned Aryan Papers and his dream of ever making a Holocaust picture when he realized no work was going to speak for the millions who died. The fear is trying to avoid short sighted moralizing that does not register with people who have experience with the event. The history of Hollywood and commercial art relying on fictional narratives has almost expunged film from getting any benefit of a doubt. Exceptions exist, and Miral gets a plus because Rula Jebreal based the character of Miral on her own life. Hindi Hussein was her real mentor and the path they took together grew into a mother-daughter relationship. Since Jebreal wrote the screenplay, the film is kept biographical.
There are some unique prisms to Miral. Rula Jebreal is acting on Hindi Hussein’s account to include the entire history of the school in her own biographical work, but she is also acting on author-subject accord to make the relationship between the writer and the subject feel interconnected in ways that cannot be rationed down to a formula. The simulation is metaphysical because the reader/viewer is thinking about processes in-and-out of the work, but specifically, the story shows an ongoing history of semi-political works that understand the inability to address full topics so compress their focus to facts more interpersonal to characters in history. The greatest biography of the 20th century was also one of the most compelling accounts of the Spanish Civil War, The Forging of a Rebel. Its author, Arturo Barea, was mainly re-telling his life but his identity to have a life became forged in the war. The creation of an identity is what became the main focus of the enormous book. Instead of self experiences, Miral road maps a theoretical history around the protagonist’s parameters of life to show how her school and other people in her life were a lead in to finding her identity through the Israeli/Palestinian situation.
Perceived political deft of a subject is based on a version of hindsight intelligence. Since the abject commentator has every published account to go on, they have the resources to say how a work is limited in its vision. The clemency for a work like Miral is that it makes a shrine for Hindi Hussein and allocates ideas of her beliefs and hopes. She is a historical figure who lived a full life within the struggle. Her dying hopes may come off as naive in greater schemes, but the film pays higher debt to her cause by hunkering down with her basic hopes and dreams when she was still alive. As much as the second guesser wants to point out limitations in her beliefs, they cannot put themselves in her day-to-day reality of what she felt was attainable and important progress between Palestinians and Israelis. Her entire life is moderating on give-and-take between both sides so the idea she could feel positive thoughts over a conservative settlement isn’t too surprising. Since political notions are created by outside forces and make up imaginary narratives about a situation, the film’s measured political commentary goes back to its biographical focus.
Last but not least, the director needs to be regarded. Julian Schnabel is continuing on a path with few doubts. So far in his career, he is trademarking his approach with veracity over style engagement. Isn’t to say he can’t delve into styles, but he isn’t genre conscious like other filmmakers. Whatever moods and tempos Schnabel warms to, they seem to exist on an individual basis of what he thinks what will just help the emotions in a scene. Other structures and considerations seem to be damned. In Miral, a consistent production technique is to over saturate the light. The locale is Middle East so brighter scenes inhabit the visual senses even more. A moderate cliche is that light is abundant in happier scenes while light is dimmer in tenser scenes. It’s an easy mood swing. Difference with Schnabel is he distils so much light radiation onto the film in many ways that the lighting feels like a veneer on the surface of something larger. In the “film is most like painting” argument, Schnabel’s predisposition to lighting seems to make it qualify here.
The other overwhelming technical stroke is the precision of the compositional storytelling. For a film that travels over 30 years of story, the running time is under two hours. Instead of laboring through a methodical tone, Schnabel minimizes the amount of scenes and scenery the audience gets to see. After a while, it becomes evident the film wants locations and people to stand out in the audience’s mind. No physical alteration to adjust their reality and the school is the only place consistently shown throughout the film, but Schnabel tries to make visual cues the focal point. For a travelogue story, it reduces the identity of Miral’s mother to a broken person who has little technical characterization and existed for the specifically traumatic moments in her life. The thematic link harkens back to Miral’s third and first-person narrative of her life. For moments she cannot specify, Rula Jebreal just elaborates on the telling parts for the story. Schnabel assists by making the scenes emotionally traumatic and fitting the disjointed narrative into an almost seamless memory.
Julian Schnabel is continuing to separate himself. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007) felt like a full mind meld of Schnabel’s realism potential from before. Some filmmakers sees decibel levels to push their filmmaking up to and call every new notch progression. Schnabel fully pulls back in his long awaited follow up. The result is not only fascinating history, but it is also a success in revamping my expectation levels. I saw visions of images to come after Diving Bell and now I see the same for Miral. Before one tries to catch up to Schnabel and play Nostradamus, all I hope is that his willing audience gets to see his next effort sooner instead of later.
Film Splatter 