Film: Ajami (2009)
Stars: Fouad Habash, Youssef Sahwani, Ibrahim Frege, Scandar Copti, Shahir Kabaha, Hilal Kabob, Eran Naim
Director: Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Israel)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars
In the meantime, though, I’ve got a few foreign language films to get
to reviewing, and part of me has been putting it off, as there’s a lot of
complicated emotions I felt while watching this and the next two (again,
time-willing, you’ll see both reviews this week). I figured I’d start with Ajami,
which wasn’t necessarily my favorite of the bunch but is definitely the most
elaborate and perhaps has the most stylistic decisions that I found intriguing.
(Spoilers Ahead) The film
operates in five different stories, each of which is somewhat connected to the
previous ones. The movie takes
place in the Ajami neighborhood of historic Jaffa, and we quickly see that this
is not going to be a film for the light of heart. In the film’s opening scenes, we see an innocent teenage
boy, who is confused for another of our characters, Omar (played by Kabaha),
shot to death as revenge from one of the crime clans that run the city. The movie continues to follow a slew of
different characters, including Omar and his younger brother Nasri (Habash) who narrates
the film, and we get to see the intermingled plots shot out of chronology, but
never tellingly so.
The film’s best attribute, honestly is its particularly strong
plotting. The movie somehow
manages to give a key plot point early in the film that seems like it’s given
away the remainder of the story (it’s hard to get emotionally invested in a
character we saw shot in cold blood earlier in the film), but we soon learn
that the movie has other ideas in mind for him. This continues throughout Ajami, and I find it
intriguing the way that they bring back some characters just in passing and
hardly acknowledge them. Usually
with this style of film we’d never have a “chapter” that didn’t verbally cue
the viewer in on a major actor passing through, but here, like in life, some
characters just are and we don’t need them to be acknowledged.
The worst problem with these types of films, where we have to balance
large ensembles, is that the less interesting characters are fairly often
overpowered by the more interesting characters. This was particularly true of Ajami in the second third of the film, when we move away from the
interesting Omar, who is the target of an assassin at the commencement of the
film and therefore the character we’re most curious about his fate, and moves
into a tale of a police officer named Dando. Dando’s story ultimately becomes involved with the climax of
the film (a fatal shootout in a parking ramp), but he seems more ancillary to
the ultimate shoot-out. Sure, he
helps to drive the accidental death that happens in this gun fight, but you
never develop the connection you do with Omar, Nasri, and a young boy named
Malek (who gets the other major chapter).
This sort of balancing expectation is unfair if I were just to judge
this as a movie (it’s very worth seeing, even if you’ll want to go hug everyone
you know afterwards), but I have to frame this a bit against the other movies
that were nominated, and A Prophet, The
White Ribbon, and The Secret in Their
Eyes were all extremely strong entries, so I want to give myself some wiggle
room as I rank them out.
The movie is dense in story, but I feel like I’d just be listing out
plot points if I continued this writeup (and you can find those over on
Wikipedia if you so choose), so I will instead hand over a quick review to you
good people (if there’s something that you want to discuss, I promise to join
you in the comments!). What were your thoughts on Ajami? Are you surprised that The
Secret in Their Eyes beat this film, since this movie seems more up AMPAS’s
alley? And since the film
stunningly got no acting nominations from the Israeli Film Academy, which actor
do you feel should have been in the running for an acting citation?
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