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SCREEN

Lemon Tree

Be warned: A good director goes into serious-social-issue mode.

By Matt Prigge

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Apr. 28, 2009

Directed by Eran Riklis
C+

“Look around,” advises an anonymous functionary at the very packed City Hall to our heroine, Palestinian widow Hiam Abbas, early on in Lemon Tree. “These people have real problems. Your problem is small.”

What is Abbas’ irrelevant problem, you ask? That her new neighbor, the callow Israeli defense minister (Doron Tavory)—who for some insane reason has set up shack right on the border—has demanded that her ancestral lemon grove, which his security people have deemed a threat, be destroyed.

This, mind you, is based on a real incident, which obviously became such a scandal that it blossomed into this very film. And said security staff was clearly a mix of too paranoid and too stupid; couldn’t they solve this issue, y’know, prior to a movie getting made?

Needless to say, Abbas doesn’t give up easily, and after procuring a nice lawyer (Ali Suliman), she turns her plight into an international incident, even winning the guilt-ridden sympathies of Tavory’s far kinder wife (Rosa Lopez-Michael).

Co-writer/director Eran Riklis previously helmed The Syrian Bride, a wedding comedy that fired off trenchant points amid Altmanesque chaos. Here he segues into serious-social-issue mode, with barely a trace of his former self.

As with this week’s American Violet, Lemon Tree isn’t afraid to be shameless: When Abbas can’t read the notice calling for her grove to be eliminated, she takes it to be translated by a man in a cafe, making her humiliation public. And when we see each family’s kids in America, Tavory’s daughter is an unhappy Georgetown student while Abbas’ son washes dishes—as if class warfare weren’t already obvious.

Clearly what people respond to with this true-life tale is that it serves as a tidy metaphor for Israeli-Palestinian strife. In Riklis’ simplistic estimation, Tavory is Old Israel, Lopez-Michael is New Israel and Abbas is Nobly Suffering Palestine. Fortunately, the great Abbas, who brought gravity to a thin, condescendingly written role in The Visitor, works similar miracles here. But Lopez-Michael, in her subtle way, almost tops her, subtly evoking a woman both oblivious and kind. Lemon Tree hardly deserves either of them.