miraL

25/30

Julian Schnabel’s Miral captures a strong and emotive side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict throughout a rich cinematography that populates the film stills.

Each characters presented is seen in a very different kind of ambience according to their personality, ambiences that alternate and mix up within the relations between these characters. For instance, Hind Husseini (Hiam Abbass) is depicted as a strong willed woman, and thus the ambience where she moves is depicted through a strong and bright light, very sharp images. On the other hand, there are very blurry dark colored and even very blueish stills that compound Nadia's scenes (Yasmine Elmasri) enhancing the dramatic ambience of this character's life.

Schnabel's film depicts Miral (Freida Pinto), the central character, in between the influence of these two characters, which is imagetically transcribed in strong sharp colors, however combined with intense close-ups of Miral's sad and beautiful face providing the viewer with a sentimental approach to the life of a palestinian woman, from her childhood to her adulthood.

When Miral is left in Hind's institution for orphan children, there's a remarkable scene that shows in a long shot the imposing gates of the school where her father (Alexander Sidding) disappears from leaving a heartbroken Miral behind. These gates and the failed attempt of Miral to follow her father shows the political barrier that will divide the place of the institution where it is required to be neutral and the outside, where, on the other hand, a political side is inherently demanded.         

Schnabel’s film presents an interesting cinematography, which gives movement to the continuous presentation of the different characters, but it's the action within this ambience that shows an ideological way of presenting the Palestinian-Israeli war: a personalized and sentimental point of view, where the cinematography clearly shows a reductive face of the war and the political lives of its inhabitants, presenting a melancholic pretty way of people of each side living together as friends, personalized by Miral and the Israeli girl, Lisa (performed by Schnabel’s daughter), revealing, once again, a simplified look over the relations of several characters whose lives are covered in pity, where the experience of the traumatic and the contingent is reintegrated in a speech of meaning and peace.

03:09:2010