Bedlam Breaks Open In Israel

On an otherwise sleepy village street, a motorcycle putts into the frame. In the corner of the frame, a man jacks his rickety sedan to fix a flat. The motorcycle whirs by, and the driver blasts four rounds into the man and his tire. In a moment, the man's family runs out of the house and decries God because the motorcyclist had killed the wrong man; he had mistaken him for the drug-dealing brother. So begins Ajami, a hard-boiled, multiple narrative saga set in the crime-laden and dirt-smeared neighborhoods of Jaffa, Israel.

Ajami marks the third year in a row an Israeli film has earned a Best Foreign Film nomination at the Oscars (Ajami lost to Argentina's El secreto de sus ojos last week). Christian Arab director Scandar Copti and Jewish director Yaron Shani teamed up to weave together a series of five stories in the same neighborhood of Ajami, the neighborhood where both directors grew up. Opting to use nonprofessional actors and screen the entire film without a score (except when music emerges at a night club), Copti and Shani craft a stark, dry, and rugged world, devoid of compassion and rife with crime. For the most part, the technique works, piercing the audience's core with its relentlessly realistic storytelling. At times, however, the film becomes so arid the audience will gasp for a gulp of any liquid.

For one, the film captures the chaos of modern Israel in a way CNN and BBC dream of attaining, with its moments of obscenity treated as commonplace. In one scene, a man shouts to Malek – one of the film's drug-dealing protagonists – that the police will soon raid the place in search for him. Malek, played by Ibrahim Frege, hides in a house only to discover a surprise party for his 16th birthday, where the hosts screen a video from Malek's mother, who has been hospitalized and unable to see Malek for months.

Without a score to guide our emotions, we can only endure the painstaking realism of the scene. Throughout the five stories, Copti and Shani craft similar scenes of raw heartbreak – a man digging through rubble in silence as he searches for the remnants of his son, a family shrieking at security guards as they reveal the body has been identified as their child, a boy examining his friend's body after he was shot in a parking garage.

Beyond the unflinching violence, Ajami also assuages us with flashes of tenderness. The brother who the motorcyclist intended to kill, Nasri, played by Fouad Habash, finds his one solace with a local waitress. In one scene, the camera zooms in so their hands fill the entire frame; for a second, their two pinkies intertwine. Other than embraces when a family discovers a dead body, this marks the only moment of intimacy of the entire film.
At times throughout the film, though, the lack of inflection in the nonprofessional actors and the absence of atmosphere without a score feel more empty than effective. Some of the movie's most violent scenes lull by with a missing passion in the actors; though this enhances the documentary feel of the film, it ironically thrusts us out of our suspension of disbelief.

A rough-edged Crash set in the drug-addled villages of Israel, Ajami is a stirring portrait of a modern war state. Had Copti and Shani selected professional actors, they could have sculpted a classic, but they would have lost the realism in the process.