On Sameh Zoabi's Be Quiet

The best movies are the simplest. And what could be simpler than a nineteen minute film about a little boy and his father in a car, on their way from his uncle's funeral to their field. Except that the father and the child are Palestinians with Israeli license plates, the funeral was in the West Bank, and they have to cross the infamous checkpoints, the field in question being in Nazareth.

Sameh Zoabi's pithily titled Be Quiet is about submittal to authority as a way of survival. For that is the way in these parts; the journey of the father-and-son duo may be simple, but it is far from ordinary. Indeed, life and its little chores can seldom be ordinary under a watchful eye. How can a child endure the humiliation of seeing his father held down by guards at the checkpoints? It can only wound his pride, rubbing in the salt of his father's impotence. Nothing untoward happens in the film, but one can constantly sense how lives teeter on the brink of death (a point cleverly made by a truck almost running over the little boy) in these parts.

Be Quiet is a truly subversive film, challenging the paternalistic authority that power seeks to acquire, whilst recognizing the varieties of paternalism worth having. It reminds us why art is so much about refusing to grow up and resisting cynicism of the sort that perpetuates the violence in these and other parts of the world.

The Benefits of Doubt

One of the many remarkable things about John Patrick Shanley's Doubt is its ability to capture on film that unmistakable pall of melancholy that hangs over Catholic churches and schools. Adding to this somberness are the denizens of the Bronx circa 1964, sporting dull shades of black, gray, brown and white. In fact the first streak of colored garment you notice is the gold rim on Father Flynn (Phillip Seymour Hoffman)'s cassock. This befitting introduction instantly marks him out as being of a somewhat different feather than his flock, igniting in us the mistrust that he will go on to ignite in his antagonist, Sister Beauvier (Meryl Streep). She too is similarly introduced: Towering over her lot, atop a flight of stairs, Sister Beauvier reprimands William London, the most evidently pubescent of the boys, for addressing a timid Sister James (Amy Adams) by gently patting her on the arm. "She's thirsty for blood", Father Flynn quips to Sister James. This little exchange at once maps out the strict boundaries defining Catholic institutions of the day, points to the politics among the characters, and hints at Sister B's hyper-sensitivity to sex - all important motifs in the film.

Between the two nuns and the priest, the skillfully etched out characters span the continuum from free-spiritedness to orthodoxy. Father Flynn is all jokes and bonhomie, a perfect counterfoil not just to Sister Beauvier but also to the weighty seriousness of his institution. A couple of odd incidents cause Sister James to suspect that Father Flynn's fondness for Donald Miller, the only black boy in the school, may be more than avuncular. Her expression of this doubt to Sister Beauvier is enough to convince the latter of the priest's sin. As if to tease us into judgment, there are suggestions that somewhat strengthen Beauvier's point of view, but upon closer examination they merely expose us to our own biases – especially in light of the brilliantly written exchange between Sister Beauvier and Donald’s mother (Viola Davis in a heart-wrenching cameo).
While Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep could never be anything but super, to my mind the performance to watch out for is that of Amy Adams. It’s as though her tentative, virginal and torn Sister James were living the did-he-or-didn't-he dilemma, precariously straddling the opposing certitudes of Flynn and Beauvier.

Writers, like their readers, are often tempted to tie up all their loose ends but John Patrick Shanley does well to respect and engage his viewer's intelligence by not spelling out a verdict.
His use of everyday incidents - someone barging into a room in the midst of a delicate conversation, or a jarring telephone ring - is very effective in heightening the tension. Equally effective are those picturesquely shot, notorious New York seasons. There is one thunderstorm too many, though, unnecessarily emphasizing the tempest within the church. The thunder soundtrack in the background during the showdown between Flynn and Beauvier seems particularly out of place in a film that only alludes and never tells, its very title alluding to the blurry lines between doubt and faith. Mercifully, Shanley doesn’t give us any confrontational high-drama during Flynn’s goodbyes, leaving it to our imaginations.

Sister B's final confessional breakdown, too, merely hints at the real doubts she harbors (via a subtle close-up of her fingers clutching her cross), turning her steely certitude inside out to reveal a vulnerable, tormented soul. And that’s the irony of it all: Father Flynn, the open-minded priest who nearly embraces doubt in a sermon, surely harbors no doubts about his actions; while the seemingly conservative Beauvier, it turns out, has been plagued by that greatest of all doubts. In strange soils, indeed, these seeds of doubt do grow.

(First published at Desicritics)

Mumbai Attacks: Terror as a Religion

This placard from the Mumbai peace march struck a chord with me. It's probably meant to be an insinuation about Islam but inadvertently ends up asking an important question about the role that religion plays in politics.

I first felt uneasy about the religion and politics connection when my ninth grade English teacher asked the class if Gandhi thought religion to be separate from politics. I zealously replied, "Yes". "Wrong", she shot back, and went on to quote Gandhi: "Those who think religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion means". As the year drew to a close, the Babri masjid was demolished. For many of us midnight's grandchildren that time will forever be a point of reference, an origin from which we map out our political selves. Like Americans who map themselves to the Kennedy assassination, Mumbaikars of my generation recount their personal histories of the '93-'94 days. We all knew someone who was killed, injured, or had barely escaped death. Those who lived through the Partition doubtless feel the same way about '47.

But the mix of religion and politics is as old as history itself. Today's religions are, after all, yesterday's politics.
Terrorism has a myriad of causes, perhaps none of them generally more powerful than another. First, there is the undeniable socio-economic angle; pernicious ideology is likely to find fewer takers in societies with greater general well-being. If the account given by the captured Mumbai attacker is to be believed, he was stuck at a dead-end job that paid him 200 rupees a day and desperately wanted to rob a bank.

Then there is that nagging sense of the victim hood and oppression of one's people - whether real or imagined - and the urge to lash out against it. I'm thinking not just of the 9/11 perpetrators and extremist groups in the Middle East (where Western powers have cynically exploited extremism to their advantage, exacerbating the violence) but also of extremist Hindus. Many Mumbaikars who support the two Senas feel hapless and victimized by some imaginary other; a typical complaint is that "they" take up all the state government jobs.

Having said that, I think it's important not to discount the role religion plays in terrorism. The captured Mumbai attacker's frustrations found a perfect expression in LeT, where he was reportedly shown videos of "atrocities on Muslims in India". This, in his case,was enough to turn a prospective bank-robbing dog-day-afternoon kid into a terrorist.

I'm not suggesting that religion is solely responsible for violence, nor am I saying that it's more bad than good. There's some evidence, for instance, that religious people are more likely to be altruistic. And in some ways, we're all religious. All of us have pet peeves, blind spots and noble passions. Who in their right mind can be against poetry, art, ethical behavior and a sense of awe about the universe and our place in it? But religion isn't all bhajans, qawwalis and Christmas carols. It does provide legitimacy and righteousness to actions and ideas that the moral instinct might otherwise find indefensible - if only in its skewed interpretations. As Steve Weinberg has said, "For a good person to do a bad thing, it takes religion". What would the rath yatra be without the powerful symbolism of those larger-than-life, Adonis-like Rama cutouts? Gandhi understood this symbolism very well; he tried to use this inseparability of religion from politics constructively - Vaishnav jana to is an eloquent ode to empathy. But just as religion may turn out to be inseparable from politics, within religion it may be impossible to pick the good and leave out the bad. Even Gandhi, after all, wasn't above tainting his politics with bad religion. At a conference presided over by Jinnah, Gandhi introduced him as "a learned Muslim gentleman .... an eminent lawyer and not only a member of the Legislature but also president of the biggest Islamic association in India". If a religious Gandhi was capable of being divisive, so was a secular Jinnah. That's another thing about religion - it can creep up in unexpected places. It's a common discriminatory marker of people, and leaders time and again exploit that.

I don't know if there is a solution to this; I hope there is but I don't know. I don't have any answers. I'm just another angry Mumbaikar trying to make sense of terror. Perhaps we'll always have people who turn an ideology into a religion and fight over it. Carl Sagan saw this (rightly, I think) as an innate conflict between the destructive and creative impulses within homo heirarchicus. I just can't help thinking that if we as a species want to survive we'd better root for the creative side.