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In the first seven minutes of Amos Gitai’s ‘Free Zone’ (2005) we hear not only a Hebrew song but also the adhaan, the Islamic call to prayer. It is clear from this that this will be a film contrasting the multiple Middle Eastern identities which exist. The central characters, three women, are all displaced in their own way. As such, the connotations of Diasporas and exilic peoples are transparently clear and subsequently will not be referred to below in great deal. Rather I would like to explore the ways in which feminine identities emerge from within the diegesis. The three women are respectively an American, an Israeli and a Palestinian. All three have different cultural identities (be it ethnic, national, or religious) but they also present the viewer with different examples of womanhood and the following review analyses these differences, along with the way men respond to them.
The very first shot of the film is an extreme close up of the face of Rebecca (Natalie Portman) who is at first silently crying but then begins to sob loudly. The viewer is exposed to over three minutes of her crying and all the while the camera never pans out and there is no indication of her geographical location. In fact, it only becomes clear a few minutes later that she is in fact in the back of a car. Through the whole film Rebecca is shown to the audience to be soft, childlike, and even fragile. She is the most feminine looking of all three women; she wears light pink blusher, mascara, jewellery and even a pink fluffy jumper. As she is driven to the free zone by Hanna (Hanna Laslo), the camera lingers on another extreme close up of her face which makes her look almost angelic. The camera leans in towards her but dances around her features as if it is too afraid to get any closer. Rebecca’s femininity is linked to being childlike and the references to her university course and her professor remind us that she is much younger than the other two women and has encountered far less in her life. When she is happy, she is animated and gesticulates wildly and she is inquisitive in a way that betrays a fearlessness that comes hand in hand with naiveté and youth. She goes as far as to defy Hanna’s orders not to drink coffee with the Jordanian gas attendant. About halfway into the film Hanna talks of her husband’s business as an armoured car salesman and Rebecca quips, “I was hoping for something a little bit romantic. I was thinking camels, hookahs and sand dunes.”
Significantly however, Rebecca, an American in Israel no longer seems to have much affiliation with her Jewish origins. The audience learns that she came to Israel to live and was informed that as her mother is a gentile, she is not Jewish at all. This leaves her feeling very lost, physically, and emotionally. She came to Israel to seek an identity and develop it but on finding it did not belong to her, does not know what to do or what to consider herself. “I didn’t feel I belonged in the US…I’m starting to think I don’t belong anywhere.” We can also note the interesting way in which Rebecca’s femininity is perceived by men, both as being sexual and frail. A border guard looks at her anglicised and attractive appearance and thinks she must be a prostitute. When she informs her fiancé, Julio, that she wishes to end their relationship, he asks her in all seriousness, “What will you do without me?”
In contrast to Rebecca, we have Hanna (Hanna Laslo) her Jewish Israeli driver whose parents fled Germany during the period of the Nazis. Hanna is older than Rebecca and is far more assertive. She understands how to deal with passport control and is able to navigate her way across the various countries of the border by her understanding of several languages. While the softness of Rebecca’s character is solidified by her appearance, the practicality of Hanna’s nature is reflected in her attire too; she wears her hair pulled back, and she seems motherly rather than sexual. She is a capable woman who drives farm equipment as well as taxis, milks cows and has had to work very hard, which explains why she feels so weary and tired. Hanna has no qualms about who she is, she considers herself Jewish and an Israeli. Her identification as an Israeli runs so deep that when she is asked where her family are from originally (a fair question since Israel is a young state) she becomes defensive and replies, ‘Auschwitz’, as if feeling the need to somehow defend her presence. Hanna is arguably the strongest of the three women and yet Hanna’s identity is to an extent also constructed by the men around her. She refers to herself repeatedly as ‘Moshe’s wife’ and when Rebecca asks why Hanna thinks accepting tea from Leila (Hiam Abbas) isn’t kosher, she reluctantly replies “the Rabbi says it isn’t.” She unquestioningly accepts a patriarch’s definition of that which is allowed for her as a Jewish woman.
While Hanna’s femininity is different to Rebecca’s, like hers it is easily deconstructed. The third construction of feminine identity however is not so easy to assess. It is that of Leila, a Palestinian who works in the free zone and has to accompany Hanna on her search for the enigmatic ‘American’. It is a full 46 minutes before we are introduced to this character and physically, she is perhaps not the traditional Palestinian one may expect to see onscreen. Leila has short, bobbed hair, wears Western clothes and smokes. While Rebecca, the American, sits as a symbol of Western mediation between Israel and Palestine, it is actually Leila who carries the middle ground of femininity. She is not naïve or spontaneous like Rebecca, but neither is she as sceptical and distrusting as Hanna. Like both of them she has her own problems with how men react to her (she is considered decadent by her stepson who feels her modern, progressive behaviour somehow shames their village). Frustratingly however, she is given a very small amount of screen time and this results in her being the least three dimensional.
As the main diegesis of the film takes place within Hanna’s taxi, the audience sees shot after shot where the camera is situated by the passenger seat of the car. This gives the footage a faux-documentary feel, rather like much of Abbas Kiarostmi’s highly acclaimed ‘10’. This also serves to remind us that the women seem to be constantly wandering, trying to get from one place to another, first to the free zone, then to Leila’s house and then over the border to find Leila’s son. It is interesting that throughout all this, the land of the different borders and geographical locations looks almost identical, even to an eye familiar with the landscape of the Middle East. It is only the traffic signs which make it clear to us whether we are in Israel or Jordan. While each state and border crossing have its own cultural and religious identity (often having multiple identities) the actual physical makeup of the land is very similar. Hanna and Leila both define themselves as being different, enemies even, and yet the ground of the borders they feel they both have claim to is the same on each side.
Identity is hugely complex in this film and so is the relationship between the peoples of the various borders. However, it is not just the women who exemplify this, the men too are affected by the interlinking of locations and nationalities. Hanna’s husband Moshe is an Israeli who sells armoured Jordanian cars to the Iraqis. Rebecca’s fiancé Julio is a Spanish Jew who may or may not have raped a Palestinian refugee. Then we have ‘The American’ the mystery business partner of Moshe who turns out to be the person the audience is least expecting. The men are as complex as the women in terms of cultural specificity but unlike their female counterparts, they do not have their masculinity explored in a similar way.
The symbolism towards the current Middle Eastern crisis permeates this film and Gitai goes to great efforts to show us how both Israelis and Palestinians suffer. The translation of the ‘Had Gadia’, the traditional Passover song which bookends the film, includes the lines, “How long will the circle of Horror last…of persecutor and persecuted…when will this madness end?” It is not lost on the audience and neither is the fact that Rebecca, a Westerner, attempts to bring together Hanna and Leila, an Israeli and a Palestinian. However, the film has at times been criticised for this (Jeff Shannon of Seattle Times complained of “speechifying”) but to his credibility Gitai does not attempt to give the viewer an unrealistic sentimental ending. We see the women work together when changing a tyre and at one point all three women dance along to a song playing on the radio. However, there is no magic solution for the problems experienced by the women and in fact there is little resolution between them as the final shot is of Hanna and Leila arguing.
While Free Zone does not delve into the deep nature of Middle Eastern politics it does give us a glimpse into the natural reactions and relationships between normal people in otherwise unnatural circumstances. Ultimately the women co-operate together because of their gender and although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict always lingers in the drama, we can conclude that ultimately the film has much more to say about the way in which women identify themselves and relate to each other.
Country: Israel, Belgium, France, Spain
Budget: ££837, 206
Length: 93mins
Pub/2009
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