The Current Cinema - Courting Disaster

“The Insult” and “Paddington 2.”

- Anthony Lane

The most important person in “The Insult,” you could say, is not in the movie. We see his flickering image, and we listen to the clarion call of his words, but the man himself is dead long before the plot gets under way. Bachir Gemayel, the leader of a powerful Christian militia in the Lebanese civil war, was backed by the Reagan Administration, elected as President of Lebanon, and assassinated before he could take office, in 1982. The film is set in the present day, but it is Gemayel’s memory that is invoked at the start, to approving roars, at a political rally. One of those applauding is a mechanic named Tony Hanna (Adel Karam), and at his garage, some time later, Gemayel can be heard in the background, on TV, declaiming against “the Palestinian refugee, wandering the world, ruining everything in his path.”

In earshot, at this precise moment, would you believe—and the movie is a hymn to coincidence, asking us to believe a great deal—is a Palestinian refugee. He is Yasser Salameh (Kamel El Basha), and he and Tony have already raised each other’s hackles. The quarrel sprang, as quarrels tend to do, from next to nothing. Yasser, a foreman on a local construction crew, fixed a new drainpipe to Tony’s balcony, as regulations required. Tony, for whatever reason, smashed the pipe. Yasser called him a “fucking prick.” (The fecundity of the oath, in Arabic, may be richer than the subtitles can express.) Tony demanded an apology, and Yasser, belatedly, has come to deliver it. His diplomatic mission does not go well. Gemayel’s hostility clouds the air; Tony fouls it further by saying, “I wish Ariel Sharon had wiped you all out.” Yasser responds with a fist to Tony’s midriff, cracking two of his ribs. Battle is joined.