Costanzo’s debut feature film is potent stuff. In telling his story about a Palestinian family of seven, whose home in the West Bank is abruptly taken over by Israeli soldiers, Costanzo uses a vérité approach that creates a tension-filled sense of immediacy and volatility. The story is a parable about the interminability of the conflict between Palestine and Israel and its deleterious effects on individuals of both sides. Mohammad (Bakri) heads a household that includes his wife and their five children. At the start of the film, their isolated home, which is located between a Palestinian village and an Israeli settlement, is seized by the soldiers for its strategic position as a lookout post. The house is divided into zones: The Israeli soldiers stake out the top floor and forbid the Arab family from going upstairs; the family is consigned to the lower floor, where all seven are locked in the living room each night to sleep. The psychological effects of the semi-occupation on the family members becomes the heart of the film, whose opening sequence drops us into the middle of their fervid controversy. Mohammad, a teacher, insists on living by his principles and refuses to abandon his home and flee for safety, while his wife, Samiah (Omari), wants him to abandon his principles in favor of the safety of his children. However, it’s clear that his pacifist approach toward holding one’s ground is what he wants to pass on to the next generation. He makes compromises and suffers the daily indignities (things like this grown man’s inability to get out of their locked room at night to make a sudden trip to the bathroom), yet he does not become a refugee with nothing to call his own. The eldest daughter resists the opportunity to go away to school and wants to stay and fight, while the eldest son wants nothing more than to flee the conflict but becomes seduced by the Arab terrorist proselytizing he sees on TV. The youngest daughter becomes severely emotionally traumatized when she is accidentally locked out of the living room during a hale of gunfire. The youngest boy seems fairly unfazed by the “normalcy” of it all, and the middle son vacillates between the optimism of rebuilding the greenhouse after every barrage and the destructiveness of planting a crude land mine on its premises. Private is shot with a hand-held DV camera that gives most of the action that jittery vérité feel, although filming certain sections in pitch blackness is a choice that only enhances confusion instead of reality. Despite being an Italian production, the characters speak in Arabic, Hebrew, and English (ironically, the common language) – an anomaly that prevented the film from being eligible as Italy’s 2005 Oscar submission for consideration as the Best Foreign Language film. Although Private downplays direct political issues, the film’s sympathies are clearly with the occupied, which will cause many to dismiss it out of hand. A semi-absurdist closing scene doesn’t help matters: Instead of the no man’s land of the last 90 minutes, we are suddenly deposited in the land of Kafka – a dwelling place of no closure that condemns the situation to continue in an eternal loop.
This article appears in March 10 • 2006.
