These Mean Streets Are In Beirut

During the Hebrew month of Cheshvan, or MarCheshvan, [Bitter Cheshvan] there are no Jewish holidays.  Jvillage Network, therefore, will be printing articles relating to Jewish Arts.

Eran Riklis’ ‘Zaytoun’ is an homage to Martin Scorsese.

by George Robinson, Special to the Jewish Week

It would not surprise me if the daily reviews for “Zaytoun,” Eran Riklis’ new film which opens on Sept. 20, chide the Israeli filmmaker for sentimentalizing the film’s central relationship. The movie traces the slowly growing friendship between Yoni (Stephen Dorff), a downed Israeli flyer, and his erstwhile captor Fahed (Abdallah El Akal), a 12-year-old Palestinian refugee who helps him escape captivity during the first Lebanon War. As the pair move from open enmity to tough love and eventually to mutual respect, it would be easy to overlook the intelligent emotional distance with which Riklis treats them, to mistake the film for an easy celebration of the Rodney King-can’t-we-all-get-along school of ineffectual good will.

In reality, Riklis treats the material with enough detachment and wry humor to keep it from becoming a runny treacle bun of a movie. He starts in the very first moment, a vertiginous and lengthy tracking shot that immediately establishes the universe in which Fahed lives: the shattered streets of Beirut, the kaleidoscope of street vendors, scruffy kids and men with guns that is his environment. Riklis keeps both the camera and his cast moving, never letting us settle into a single viewpoint for more than a few seconds.

“I wanted to do two things with that shot,” Riklis said in an interview last month. “I wanted to grab you and take you into this world. And I wanted to open with a big, energetic statement of style, to say, ‘Hey, you’re entering the cinema!’”

The result is a more expansive visual style than is seen in much of his other work; that shot is an homage, he says, to early Martin Scorsese films like “Mean Streets.”

The bravura entrance also reflects Riklis’ image of Beirut in the early ’80s.

“That kind of energy has a lot to do with Beirut in those days,” he said. “It’s also important that in the first 12 minutes of so of the film there would be all this activity, because after that the film is basically a two-man show.”

Or one-man-and-a-boy show.

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