Tunisia, 1942: Humanity Amid Inhumanity

66 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 1 0 town ruled over by an evildoer named Carnegie, who’s been hunting obsessively for a book that will, he claims, enable him toruletheworld. Although much of the story is standard-issue action fare, it gains interest from the identity of Eli’s book. (If you plan to see the picture, you should put off the restofthisreviewuntilthen.)Itturnsoutto betheBible,whichhasbecomeararitybecause some people held it responsible for the nuclear cataclysm and destroyed every copy except the one that Eli found. As its guardian, Eli is the hero of the film, and a finale resembling Fahrenheit451 confirms the wisdom of his struggle to preserve it. But it’s revealing that Carnegie covets the book because he knows how readily its meanings can be misappropriated to deceive and manipulate the masses. Could the nuclear disaster have indeed been caused by a demagogue—like Carnegie, or like the Rev. Robertson, for that matter—who thumped the Bible so hard that the world literally exploded? Food for thought. I David Sterritt, Tikkun’s film critic, is chairman of the National Society of Film Critics and professor emeritus at Long Island University. He wasfilmcriticofTheChristianScienceMonitor for decades. His latest books are The B List and TheHoneymooners. TUNISIA,1942: HUMANITYAMID INHUMANITY THEWEDDINGSONG,GloriaFilm France3Cinema Review by Ralph Seliger T he Wedding Song begins with a young girl sweetly singing an Arabic wedding ditty. This is followed abruptly by a photo tableaux of the infamous Grand Mufti of Jerusalem meeting with Hitler and his SS henchman, Himmler, and reviewing Nazi troops. The Mufti— through his Arabic radio broadcasts from Berlin, his recruitment of Balkan Muslims to the SS, and his work against the British inIraq—spearheadedNaziGermany’soutreacheffortstoArabsandMuslims . The Wedding Song is an emotionally charged drama with documentary appeal—bothethnographicandhistorical. It is also highly sensual, with the need for actors willing to appear naked in some scenes having caused the French director /writer Karin Albou to cast herself in a major role. “I couldn’t find an actress who matchedwhatIhadwritten,”shesays.“The FrenchonesdidnotspeakArabic;theArab onesdidnotwanttogetnakedinthehammam [Turkish bath]. My husband and a friendofminetoldme‘whydon’tyoudoit?’ So I had myself go through the casting process!” She also cast a non-Arab French woman,OlympeBorval,asthemainArabMuslimcharacter . BorvalhadtolearnsufficientArabicfor her role. Both Arab and Jewish characters routinely mix French and Arabic, often switching languages from sentence to sentence . The film depicts the intimate living conditionsandtheweddingcustomslargely practiced and celebrated in common by NorthAfricanJewsandArabs. The story begins in November 1942 and is set entirely in Tunisia. That month, the tide of World War II dramatically turned against the Axis in North Africa, with the British victory at El Alamein and thelandingofU.S.andBritishforcesinAlgeria and Morocco. But Field Marshall Erwin Rommel successfully withdrew his Afrika Korps to Tunisia, where the Hollywood usually avoids making God a bad guy who needs to be bailed out by an angel when He goes postal. Perhaps the picture is aimed at people like Rev. Pat Robertson, whose noxious brand of Christianity revels in self-righteous rage, blaming a “pact with the devil” for Haiti’s recent earthquake and saying ungodly tolerance for abortion, feminists, and homosexuals provoked Hurricane Katrina and the September 11 attacks. By those lights, God is the scariest villain since Ming the Merciless ,andweshouldallhopeMichaelshows up the next time God’s temper gets out of hand. Legion is a blasphemously bad movie—thinkWingsofDesiremeetsNight of the Living Dead—but it illustrates the scarytruththatviolenceandparanoiahave colonized contemporary consciousness so completely that entertainers now imagine even the angels with guns in their hands andhatredintheireyes. The Lovely Bones, based on Alice Sebold’s bestselling novel and directed by PeterJackson,presentsamorebenignview of divine intervention. Susie, a fourteenyear -old schoolgirl, is murdered by a madman in her neighborhood and later watches from above as her parents try to track the killer down. They don’t succeed, but the madman gets his just deserts anyway , thanks to Susie’s uncanny (and unexplained ) ability to project her desires earthward at critical moments. While the picture is nonsensical, attention must be paid to it, because it’s exactly...