Rana's Wedding Review
Rana's Wedding is a trenchant film about Palestinian life under occupation, dealing with its subject effectively on an intimate human scale, but it occasionally strays into heavy-handedness. Writer/director Hany Abu-Assad, an experienced documentarian, makes excellent use of non-professional actors and his vibrant Jerusalem and Ramallah locations, giving a realistically gritty feel to his story. The story itself has a tried and true feel, as Rana (Clara_Khoury) searches for Khalil (Khalifa_Natour), the theater director she loves, racing the clock so she can marry him before her disapproving father (Zuher_Fahoum) leaves for Egypt. But the specifics of the story give it added resonance. Rana faces her father's (and her society's) restrictive patriarchal attitudes (a theme which Abu-Assad deals with subtly and effectively), but she also deals with this crisis in a land where a cry of frustration directed at a cell phone is cause for a group of Israeli soldiers to train their guns on her, and where a hastily packed handbag, inadvertently left on a street corner for a few minutes, is quickly blown up by a bomb-destroying robot. In these brief scenes, the filmmaker makes his points about occupation wittily and efficiently, so it's a shame he feels it necessary to hammer home the point by having Rana state his case explicitly. At one point, Rana is dashing through a checkpoint where Israeli soldiers are shooting at rock-throwing Palestinian boys, and she actually stops to pick up a stone and throw it herself in a dangerous and completely unnecessary, not to mention unlikely, gesture. Rana's Wedding is a well-made and worthy film, but in dealing with such emotionally potent subject matter, Abu-Assad would have been better off presenting his story without overt politicizing and letting viewers draw their own conclusions. Josh Ralske, Rovi
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