Seeds of conflict

Palestinian film-maker Elia Suleiman's movie, which won the International Critics' Prize at Cannes last year, opens with a bizarre image: a figure dressed as Santa Claus runs across the hills above Nazareth, pursued by a gang of youths who ignore the presents he throws in their path to distract them.

Trapped in the entrance to a church, Santa ends up with a carving knife protruding from his chest, though who left it there is unclear.

From then on, Suleiman delivers a series of vignettes (many without dialogue) that are designed to show how the petty squabbles of intractable neighbours sow the seeds of greater conflict, from the man who regularly tosses his rubbish-sacks into his neighbour's garden to the repeated wrecking and rebuilding of a small roadside wall. Schematic and repetitive, it does little to illuminate the Arab/ Israeli conflict beyond the simplistic argument that people should talk to each other.

The meandering and inconsequential nature of the film offers occasional, sporadic delights. Suleiman extracts maximum irony from minimal ideas. The distant view of a gang of boys beating someone (or something) unseen to death conjures an appalling image in the mind until the victim is revealed as a snake. The regular rendezvous of two lovers - one from Ramallah and one from Jerusalem - is conducted in a car within yards of the armed checkpoint that separates the two places. A man tosses a date stone from his car at a tank which immediately erupts in a spectacular explosion.

The only time that this quirky film goes beyond the limit is in a fantasy sequence in which members of the Israeli army are at target practice, shooting at cut-outs of a Palestinian woman.

Conducted like a dance routine, it tilts into absurdist fantasy when a real woman emerges and fights the heavily armed soldiers with a slingshot.

This may well be a potent symbol of the difference between one side and the other, but it's expression is grotesquely adolescent. Compared with recent films from countries such as Iran, this is a very modest example of benign invective.

Suleiman favours ironic detachment over intelligent passion. The result is a kind of Simpleton's Guide to the Arab/Israeli conflict. His report card therefore reads: Could Do Better.

Divine Intervention
Cert: 15