Mediterranean Fever (2022, Maha Haj) (Patreon)

51/100

Classic sophomore slump. To some extent, the degree of difficulty is just higher—a lot of what I dug about Personal Affairs was its offbeat expanding-then-contracting anecdotal structure, whereas here she sticks to a single protagonist and narrative throughout. And that conventional focus makes her approach less poetic and a whole lot clunkier, with the film twice stopping cold to let Waleed wax aggrieved, first about government forms that ask for one's religion, then about his son's geography teacher insisting that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel rather than of Palestine. Amer Hlehel, who was part of the Affairs ensemble, does magnificently prickly work in the lead role, and I briefly perked up when Waleed discovers that his obnoxious new neighbor is deeply in debt to a loan shark; "Think I'll go onto the balcony and 'casually' hang out with the two goons who were sent to collect" seemed to be taking schadenfreude to a potentially hilariously dangerous new level. Alas, it turns out that he's looking for someone to murder him, because—as the didactic, kinda painfully unrelated interludes I mention above nonetheless strongly imply—simply being Palestinian has become unendurable. (This development even retroactively kills what I'd thought was a fine mordant joke, in which a dude on an oxygen tank listens impassively while Waleed extols the virtues of legally sanctioned euthanasia, then calls for someone to wheel him the fuck away. Just foreshadowing.) There's a curious and intriguing suggestion that Waleed inflicts unintentional misery upon everyone around him; Haj never really takes that anywhere, though, and the movie ends by suggesting that Waleed will keep trying until he succeeds in ending his stateless torment. Also don't understand how the opening dream sequence, with its laborious self-justification-attributed-to-another, relates to anything that follows, which is too bad since that seemed like a promising introduction to one seriously fucked-up psyche. Will Haj's third feature be a Soderbergh-style return to form, or will it be Chappie? Watch this space.