March 7, 2010: Ajami
It’s been a long slog through the Oscar-nominated films this year, admittedly with plenty of bright spots although it felt like a weaker than usual year overall, despite the strong core contenders. My final tick of the checkbox this year, brought in right under the wire within a few hours of the Oscar show and mere minutes of the start of the dinner and Oscar-viewing party I was hosting, is Ajami, a Best Foreign Language Film nominee from Israel.
Ajami tells a number of parallel stories of petty gangsters and warring families in a Tel Aviv neighbourhood. It’s disturbingly clear that this is a chronicle of everyday life. The chain of events in question is examined from several different points of view, with a few key incidents to tie all of the perspectives together.
I’m afraid I wasn’t really in the right head space for this viewing, during a frenzied weekend mid-afternoon. Ajami depicts a slice of life from an angle which is very rarely seen amid the media firestorm, illustrating the individual human struggles where the rest of the world sees only broad ideological conflicts. The film is complex and I’m quite sure a second viewing would be necessary in order to understand the characters and their motivations. I can certainly recommend Ajami, but I’m not sure that I can recommend a single viewing of it. It did not win the Oscar but I would have been fine with it as the victor.
The Oscar push reaches an end.
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