Gothenburg, Sweden is a beautiful European city, a seaport on Sweden’s west coast. As I arrive, Gothenburg is midway through its 35th film festival, and a recent film market initiative meant to promote Scandinavian films more effectively into the world marketplace. The city is particularly beautiful at night, softly lit, each block old and gracious and for the most part at 19th century height.
I set out for dinner—we have our priorities here—to the Fish Church (Fiskekorka) just off the port, a church that has been converted to a simply breathtaking fish market, with counters lining the aisle where the brides used to walk. Upstairs is a renowned fish restaurant. I arrived about 5:30 PM for dinner (jet lagged), and the young chef-owner was closing since he’s a lunch spot. He reserved a table for me, however, at FiskeKrogen, the old standby classical fish restaurant of Gothenburg, to which I repaired immediately on foot.
I began my film foray into the North Country with a sensational herring appetizer plate with aquavit, followed by a slice of cod on a medley of cabbages and cod infused potatoes. I am a Swede, it turns out, by culinary disposition as well as genetic line (my grandfather on my paternal side was from Malmö, to the south). I love this food. I don’t love the price. But I love this food.
Then on to a screening of Habibi, by Susan Youssef, at the Cinema Roy. The film is part of a Gothenburg programming initiative to show Arabic language films inspired in part by the Arab Spring uprising of 2011 and in part by Sweden’s and Europe’s uneasy domestic relations with its growing Islamic immigrant population.
Youssef is a young Brooklyn born woman with ties to the West Bank and Gaza. Habibi is a contemporary retelling inspired by a 7th Century Sufi tale, Majnun Layla, an ill fated love story between a poet who was denied his love for the young Layla, about whom he writes on walls everywhere. That alone is enough to enrage Layla’s family when it happens in Gaza in 2001.
Layla’s parents want her to marry a doctor—sound familiar? The doctor, who is rather full of himself, reassures her father over dinner that while he learned medicine in the United States, he still supports Hamas. Plus he’s got a big dowry. Layla is something of a Popular Front supporter herself, and she recoils at the doctor on almost all counts: he’s a pig, she says, he only works and then wants food and sleep (sex is left out), and she’s not happy at barter trumping choice.
However, the film begins with her wild swooning love affair with a young poet, Qays, who dropped out of university, lives in a refugee camp with his father, and is working construction when he can keep a job, which is never. She met Qays at university in Birzeit in the West Bank, but blames the Israelis for thwarting her studies and her love affair with Qays, after they refused to renew her student visa, which lands her back home in Gaza. When the doctor-suitor, Ward, cajoles Layla and her brothers into taking a ride one night, her brother is shot by a sniper Layla and her brothers say was an Israeli.
I myself haven’t heard that Israeli sniper attacks have been an ongoing act of random provocation in Gaza, but no matter. Habibi came out of her own broken romance in Gaza, Youssef told the crowd at the Roy, and that the story has its roots in Manyun Layla which is the basis for Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. But it doesn’t seem so: that linkage might involve an Israeli and a Palestinian, which would serve as a reminder a la Montague and Capulet that a family feud—its logic, its history—obliterates what is most precious, not just young love but the future. In Habibi, the problem created by the ill-fated love between Youssef’s contemporary lovers is primarily internal to the Arab community. Israel remains in the background as an all-purpose bugaboo to take the rap about this or that twist in the plot onscreen or in the backstory.
Layla is played by Maiasa Abd Elhadi, who was recommended to Youssef by Julian Schnabel as an uncommon actress, though he’d cut Elhadi entirely from his ill-fated Palestinian film, Miral. Qays is given a road kill puppy performance by Kais Nashif, which somewhat shades the problem about tradition trumping romantic love in Habibi: while an enlightened parent might not shove a doctor down his daughter’s throat, almost no parent would buy Qays in Youssef’s script as anything but an accident waiting for a scene to happen.
Layla's love for Qays is doomed by her family and its 7th century reading of the Koran about women’s honor and duties. Her preference for modern love and its rituals and public expression versus arranged marriage is the faultline between modernity and fundamentalism of any stripe. The key line in the film is Layla's. Hounded and threatened from all sides, even by randomly passing young Arab men who see the lovers speaking affectionately on a beach that is their last refuge, Layla says in exasperation "This religion is supposed to be about love. That makes us the most religious of all."
Youssef’s lovers are driven into the sea by her family, though en route Layla and her family blame Israel for the occupation that prevents Palestinians from getting where they want to go, a complaint that has generated its own film genre. It’s hard to tell if this is unconscious and habitual or if it’s a strategy to deflect Habibi’s real target, which is the internal conflict in the Muslim world between fundamentalism and modernity. It’s that chasm that prevents Youssef’s characters from moving forward to where they want to go, something like an Arab world that grants women real status with options instead of honor liabilities that must be dispatched.
Youssef said she hadn’t shown the film yet in Gaza, because “there are some touchy things in the film,” referring to dialogue surrounding her characters choosing up sides between Hamas and the Popular Front. If true, the Middle Eastern producing partners who read the script missed the truly incendiary part of the story—that fundamentalist problem of seeing women as property and men as protectors of some notion of honor that carries with it the responsibility to charge, prosecute, judge and execute infidel sisters on the spot.
Youssef wants to show the film in Gaza and the West Bank in a “responsible way,” which sounded as if it means getting the buy-in of community leaders. My guess is, however, that some part of the Palestinian audience will understand exactly where the real finger is pointing in Habibi, and it’s not at Israel or even at the Palestinian political parties arguing over the subtleties of how to dispatch the Israelis and over what period of time into the sea. Spring is coming, and once again change is in the air.
Winter in Gothenberg, however, is never less than food for thought.
