Review: “Let It Be Morning”
“Let It Be Morning” is the saddest film I have ever seen. Only one person dies, one person is wounded, and no child is harmed in the making of this movie. It is still an essay in soul-sickness and despair.
The opening scenes are joyful enough. Sami and Mira return to his village where his brother is about to be married. The young couple turns out to be mismatched—he is a closeted homosexual, she is a lovely hygiene fetishist—but the wedding is the definition of Palestinian celebration. Sami breaks away to phone his Jewish mistress, but despite his evident crankiness and depression, even he gives in to the music and the dancing.
That is one of the great themes of this co-production. Created by a team of Israeli Jews and Palestinians, it describes a world of unexpected intimacy. What we see in the media is unremitting war, but the reality is nuanced and fraught with contradiction. Israelis and Palestinians have furtive sex. They go to some of the same high schools and work in the same companies, albeit owned by Jews who are insensitive toward Arabs. Virtually all young Arabs in the film speak Hebrew, or at least enough to communicate at a checkpoint.
That is the other great theme of “Let it Be Morning”: for an Israeli Arab, the whole of the country is a checkpoint. Sami and Mira are caught in the village when it is closed for obscure security reasons. The water runs dry, the stores are depleted of merchandise, and there is no cell service that would allow Sami to call Jerusalem. Because he is gone from his job for two days, the company he works for summarily fires him, fulfilling Mira’s judgment that they never cared about him in the first place.
In this ghetto of humiliation everything falls apart. The villagers mount a futile protest against the Israelis, while living through the unravelling of their personal relationships. Like captive populations everywhere, they turn on one another, with some serving as enforcers for their Israeli overlords. At the end, the villagers appear in mass at the checkpoint to find it heavily fortified and reinforced with a wall. It is a show of defiance, but entirely futile. They must live within a Russian doll of prisons.
If there is anything here to lift the spirit, it is only that such a movie could be made. The cast is made up largely of Palestinians, but the ocasional Israeli Jew plays himself. The director, Eran Kolirin, is deeply empathic about the dehumanizing suffering of Israeli Arabs and offers it to us in a film of shattering immediacy. Even as I reacted to the omnipresent despair, I took some consolation in the radical honesty of the film. At least in the hearts of many Jewish Israelis, there is humanity, understanding, and a magnificence of empathy.