Movie Review: The Insult

The Insult ** ½ / *****

Directed by: Ziad Doueiri.

Written by: Ziad Doueiri & Joelle Touma.

Starring: Adel Karam (Toni Georges), Kamel El Basha (Yasser Abdallah Salame), Camille Salameh, Diamand Bou Abboud, Rita Hayek, Talal Jurdi, Christine Choueiri, Julia Kassar, Rifaat Torbey, Carlos Chahine.

 

The Insult is a movie that takes place in Lebanon, and is about the fallout from a seeming minor conflict between a member of the Christian party, and a Palestinian refugee. The Palestinian – Yasser (Kamel El Basha) has been hired as a construction foreman, and is supposed to fix all the building code violations in the neighborhood. The Christian, Toni (Adel Karam), has one such violation with a leaking drain pipe. Yasser goes to fix it, Toni doesn’t want him to – words are exchanged, and eventually Yasser calls Toni a “fucking prick”. While Yasser’s boss tries to broker peace, he ends up telling Yasser in no uncertain terms that if it comes to it, he will have to apologize to Toni – yet when that meeting is setup, Toni ratchets up the tension saying something insulting and incendiary – and Yasser punches him. Soon, a lawsuit is filed, and what start as a minor conflict, is now national news – a debate over who is right, who is wrong- not just in this argument, but on a grander scale.

 

The film was co-written and directed by Ziad Doueiri, whose last film, The Attack, took place in Israel, and was about a secular Palestinian doctor, who finds out that his Christian wife has become a suicide bomber. Like The Attack, his new film tries to look at things from all sides, and see that things are not as simple as they appear on the surface – there is years of outrage and victimization on both side, that feed into the actions everyone takes. Unlike The Attack however, The Insult doesn’t really work. The problem with The Insult is that it withholds too much information from the audience for too long, just so it can spring it on you at moments designed to shock you. Most of those shock moments don’t work because they either feel unnecessary (like the real identity of the two lawyers battling it out in the lawsuit) or come too late in the film to truly feel like things have been played fair up until that point (the revelation of an incident in Toni’s past). I also do not think that the film is quite as neutral as it pretends to be – while Toni is a fairly complex character, full of both positive and negative qualities, this isn’t extended to Yasser – who is portrayed far more one dimensionally good for most of the movie (really, almost everything after he punches Toni). While it’s certainly easier to sympathize with Yasser – making him a little less of a black and white good guy, could have helped.

 

Yet, while I do think this flaws eventually become too much for the movie to bare, I will say that the film remains an entertaining bad film from beginning to end. There is something comforting about an old school courtroom drama, full of the kind of pyrotechnics and shocks that Law & Order wouldn’t even try and pull off. The performances remain good as well. The whole subplot involving Toni’s pregnant wife lays it on way too thick – but even that has its moments. I can see The Insult becoming an art house hit – it’s the type of foreign language film that people who don’t really like foreign language films will enjoy – essentially, a Hollywood style film, in another language.

 

I do appreciate Doueiri’s approach to his films – trying to find the humanity on both sides – the villains and the heroes, finding they are often the same people. If the approach doesn’t work though, you ending up making the Lebanese equivalent of Crash – and that’s pretty much what happened here. You’re better off watching The Attack than this – far too few of you did when it was released anyway.