Ziad Doueiri
L'insulto

Making a political film, indeed. It certainly does not mean making politics with a film, it does not mean serving as a megaphone for a faction, but looking at politics from a different, higher, nobler point of view, which considers the existential dimension, the unraveling of governmental choices on the cyclical, small-scale lives of ordinary people.

This is not all taken for granted. Or rather, it is not taken for granted to know how to do it. There are films that, dealing with political issues, civil battles, take sides, cheer. There are others for which it is believed that merely addressing certain themes, almost just mentioning them, is enough to create a provocative, politically relevant work. Doueiri's celebrated work, on the other hand, identifies the perfect trajectory to follow: it deals with everyday issues, imbuing them with general, political meanings, and then shows how politics assimilates the individual feuds to fuel its own fires, without really respecting the demands of the individual citizens at the heart of the dispute.

No, politics first devastates the lives of citizens, then, when the reverberations of major national maneuvers compromise the civil coexistence of citizens, it sucks out the polemical venom, misinterpreting it, absolutizing it, using it as a pretext for its aprioristic battles. The Insult does not portray just, and not so much, a legal clash between a Lebanese Christian and a Palestinian, but rather the perpetual clash between man and History, between individual pain and collective stances, between the uplifting outcomes fantasized by official History and the endless harmful repercussions of every single belligerent act. And again, between journalistic narration of events and the real feelings of every single child and adult involuntarily caught in History.

This is an important work because it knows how to narrate the macroscopic instances of human existence through a single case, a quarrel that arises from not even so serious episodes. But the initial dispute is like the pebble that triggers the avalanche, with the roots of the pain of the two opposing men slowly emerging from the opaque ground of the passing years that layer over the wounds.

There is a lesson: behind each man there is a story, not intelligible to a superficial glance. And thinking that one's own pain is always greater than that of the person in front of you is a serious mistake of superficiality. Only when one thoroughly understands the other's pain can all their reactions be fully comprehended. The consolation could not be more bitter: men reconcile only and solely in the sharing of a painful past.

Doueiri's film tells all this beautifully, gradually increasing the gravity of the matter, balancing characters, harshness, and moments of reasonableness, setting up an enjoyable, captivating legal battle that, however, knows how to avoid inciting the audience to root for one of the two opponents. And History bursts in with a force that annihilates individuals, crystallizes them in their being infinitely small cogs in an infernal machine that dispenses pain with every movement.

7.5/10