MOVIE REVIEW : Seeing Human ‘Currents’ in Arab-Israeli Conflict

“Deadly Currents” (Cineplex Odeon Fairfax) begins with startling, artily bleak monochrome shots of an Israeli troop truck jiggling through the streets of a Palestinian West Bank city, while inhabitants silently watch. It’s a sequence that immediately summons up echoes of “The Battle of Algiers” and many another leftist ‘60s political documentary or docudrama. It has the same mix of cool aestheticism and a hot, volatile subject, seething with immediacy and undercurrents of paranoia.

But director Simcha Jacobovici, who immediately switches to color, uses this style only briefly, as a poetic framing device. “Deadly Currents,” one of the most absorbing visual records of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in recent years, takes a tone far from the aggressive muckraking or passionate polemics of the anti-Vietnam years. It strives for balance, humanity. It wants us to see these antagonists--from the Israeli soldiers of the Golani platoon to the masked Palestinian members of the Intifada, from zealots on both sides to pacifists or seekers after compromise--in human terms, to understand them apart from geography and issues.

The film can never escape a tragic sense. By dividing his interview time among Israelis and Arabs, Jacobovici, a Canadian Jew whose parents were Holocaust refugees, is obviously trying to suggest that if bridges could be built--and the movie obviously tries to be one itself--the nightmare of bloodshed might end. And by varying his interviewees even further, including Israelis who are violently anti-Arab and Israelis critical of the government, Arabs who believe all Jews should be driven out of the Middle East and others who believe coexistence is possible, Jacobovici heightens the pathos. We watch the Golani platoon patrol the streets, disrupt households; members of the Intifada arrest an “informer” who will soon be executed. Both groups are risking their lives or safety for an ideal, but are either ultimately justified?

Jacobovici trusts the old liberal imperative. He believes that by giving everyone a fair say, hostile stereotypes may break down and the truth emerge. That’s why the documentary’s key character--to which Jacobovici returns again and again--is the most divided of all: a Tel Aviv street guerrilla performer named Juliano Mor, who had an Arab father and a Jewish mother, who once was an Israeli paratrooper and later tried to join the PLO--and whose current political sympathies are anarchistic, anti-authoritarian, opposed to both sides.

Screaming and smiling, shaven bald, stripped to the waste, muscles rippling like a German Expressionist android, drenching himself with blood-red paint like a character in a ‘60s Jean-Luc Godard film, Mor is a striking figure. He seems to drive part of his audience into a frenzy. At one point, a hulking, bearded Russian immigrant threatens to beat him up and spits at Jacobovici’s camera. Later, an incensed Israeli Army officer says Mor should be shot for treason, while others around him threaten Jacobovici’s crew and advance menacingly toward the cameras. The courageous director has a crowd stopper; he asks them: “Are you a Jew? Is this a Jewish way to do things?”

Though “Deadly Currents” brings us unusually close to the Palestinians--community leaders, artists, guerrillas, high school students, mothers of wounded children, ordinary citizens--with an attitude usually sympathetic, it’s in the middle, not with Mor, but with the mediators. It’s with the bridge-builders, disturbed by the seemingly irreconcilable divisions, hoping against hope for a way out of the bloody forest. When professor Yeshayahu Leibowitz voices his concern that the conflict may destroy Israel internally by breeding fascism and repression, he’s voicing an obvious concern of the movie. When another Israeli academic, Dan Schueftan, starts explaining geopolitics in terms of John Wayne and Gary Cooper Westerns, he sounds absurd not only about geopolitics, but about the movies themselves.

“Deadly Currents” (Times-rated: Family) is a memorable film of unusual force, one that should be seen by anyone, on either side, passionately interested in the subject. It’s a risky effort.

Like all people in the middle, Jacobovici and his crew expose themselves to dangers, doubts, abuse, misunderstandings. But they accomplish their purpose powerfully: They open up a dialogue.

‘Deadly Currents’

An Associated Producers Production produced with the assistance of Telefilm Canada/Ontario Film Development Corporations, in association with City/TV, released by Normandi Alliance Releasing. Director Simcha Jacobovici. Producers Jacobovici, Elliott Halpern. Executive producers Ric Esther Bienstock, David Green, Jeff Sackman. Cinematographer Mark MacKay. Editor Steve Weslak. Music Stephen Price. Sound Chiam Gilad. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.

Times-rated: Family.