{"id":6638,"date":"2018-05-17T09:49:50","date_gmt":"2018-05-17T13:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6638"},"modified":"2018-05-17T09:49:50","modified_gmt":"2018-05-17T13:49:50","slug":"the-insult","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/17\/the-insult\/","title":{"rendered":"The Insult."},"content":{"rendered":"

The Insult<\/em> (iTunes<\/a> • amazon<\/a>) was the one modest surprise among the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars this past year, edging out Golden Globes winner In the Fade<\/em> and the highly-regarded Israeli film Foxtrot<\/em>. The first Lebanese submission to earn such a nomination and just the fourteenth film ever submitted for consideration from Lebanon, The Insult<\/em> is a multi-layered drama that uses a minor disagreement to build a courtroom drama, a fable about racism, and a demonstration of how tiny gestures in either direction can have enormous consequences.<\/p>\n

Toni Hanna is a Lebanese Christian man who works at a garage and lives in an apartment he hopes to buy, along with his very pregnant (and ridiculously beautiful) wife Shirine. He\u2019s hosing off his balcony on one day when the excess water runs out his drain pipe, which apparently is a code violation, on to a few construction workers led by the foreman Yasser, a Palestinian man who has lived in Lebanon for years and married a Lebanese woman. When Yasser and his crew fix the pipe without Toni\u2019s permission, he destroys their work, leading Yasser to call him a \u201cfucking prick.\u201d Toni demands an apology, but when Yasser balks, Toni takes him to court in a lawsuit that begins as something trivial and ends up a national news story, spiraling well beyond the control of either man. The trial exposes the origins of Toni\u2019s racism and the \u2018forgotten\u2019 history of sectarian violence in Lebanon, including one incident where the PLO and PFLP (both major Palestinian terrorist organizations) played a significant part.<\/p>\n

The superficial story in The Insult<\/em> plays out a bit like a smarter Law & Order<\/em> episode. The two trials – the first in a small court, the second an appeal argued by experienced lawyers working pro bono – feel overly dramatic, although it\u2019s possible the Lebanese justice system works something like this, with judges asking witnesses and even members of the courtroom audience questions. There\u2019s a big twist right before the midpoint of the film that amps up the drama quotient of the trial, although in the end it doesn\u2019t matter much to the main plot around the dispute between the two men.<\/p>\n

The plot thread around race is, I think, the Big Point of The Insult<\/em>, and you could carry the framework very well to a similar story in just about any multi-ethnic state. Palestinians are an underclass in many nations in the Levant, and there appears to be widespread resentment against them and their somewhat protected status in Lebanon, so when Toni appears to be fighting back on behalf of Lebanese Christians, he garners public support and finds a well-known lawyer willing to take on his case to make a point. Yasser ends up with a young lawyer who says she wants to take his case because no one stands up for Palestinians\u2019 rights, and she\u2019s derided as a sort of limousine liberal by her opponents while also gaining popular backing from Lebanese Muslims and several politicians pushing for national unity.<\/p>\n

The film goes too far in justifying Toni\u2019s feelings towards Palestinians, however, when it delves into the history of his family and the incident from his childhood, the Damour massacre, that spawned his lifelong animosity towards them and support for nationalist-Christian politicians. The scene where that story is unfurled is also quite over the top, again feeling very TV-dramatized, and almost crushes the better plot thread of a quiet shift towards reconciliation between the two men. There\u2019s one moment of sincere kinship that arises by accident, and then Yasser finds a way to deliver to Toni what he thinks Toni really wants from him, enough that the outcome of the trial – which we do see, even though I thought the script might end right before the verdict was delivered – feels a bit secondary. There\u2019s an actual moral here, reminiscent of \u201cA Thousand Trees\u201d by Stereophonics, about how a tiny gesture either way can start a conflagration or defuse a potential riot: At any point, an apology from Yasser or a statement of forgiveness from Toni would have ended the entire conflict. The two men could have simply shaken hands in front of the cameras and brought the two sides together. The Insult<\/em> doesn\u2019t quite cop out to that extent, even though the legal stuff feels manipulative (even with a superb secondary performance from the wonderfully-named Diamond Bou Abboud as Yasser\u2019s attorney). The story ends up taking a middle path, wrapping up the story in a satisfying enough fashion that still felt like it could have been stronger without the more crowd-pleasing aspects of the story to drown out the humanist plot at the movie\u2019s heart.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Insult (iTunes • amazon) was the one modest surprise among the five nominees for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars this past year, edging out Golden Globes winner In the Fade and the highly-regarded Israeli film Foxtrot. The first Lebanese submission to earn such a nomination and just the fourteenth film ever submitted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[977,925,1008,215],"class_list":["post-6638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2017-best-foreign-language-film-nominees","tag-2017-movies","tag-lebanese-films","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6638"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6640,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6638\/revisions\/6640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}