Clara Khoury delivers a performance that is luminous, fierce and intensely focused as the title character of "Rana's Wedding." Hany Abu-Assad's 2002 film about a young Palestinian woman on the verge of marriage depicts with subtlety and harsh realism the ambivalence of embarking on a future that not only is marked by emotional doubts, but also is fraught with the uncertainties of wartime. As a portrait of a young woman bravely, if a bit recklessly, finally daring to carve out her own life, "Rana's Wedding" is thoroughly universal; as a depiction of middle-class Muslim life under Israeli occupation, it is searingly -- but in the end, hopefully -- specific.
"Rana's Wedding" begins at dawn on a day in November, when Rana is to respond to an ultimatum given by her father: She is to marry one of the desirable men on the list he has composed, or she is to depart with him for Egypt at 4 p.m. that day. The opening sequence transpires in almost total silence as Rana wakes, considers her future, then impulsively packs a plastic shopping bag with a teddy bear and a cell phone. After a guilty glance in on her sleeping father, she makes her break for freedom, her ambivalence showing only when she grabs an extra bite of breakfast pastry before leaving her comfortable East Jerusalem home.
While Rana frantically calls and searches the neighborhood for an unnamed person, it quickly becomes clear that she's trying to contact the man she really wants to marry. He turns out to be Khalil (Khalifa Natour), a theater director living in Ramallah. Unlike the engineers, doctors and lawyers whom Rana's father had in mind, Khalil is far too bohemian and unreliable a prospect to qualify as marriage material; undeterred, Rana takes a bus to find him, bring him back to Jerusalem and begin a new life.
What she encounters are roadblocks, both metaphoric and literal. The checkpoint between Jerusalem and Ramallah is routinely congested and sometimes comes under fire from Israeli bullets and stones hurled by Palestinian youths. As Rana travels back and forth, her journey serves as a lens on the pressing -- and oppressive -- realities of life in Israel. But even if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict defines the warp and woof of her existence, Rana's immediate concerns are purely of the heart. Only when she crosses paths with a Palestinian funeral does she confront the tension between politics and her more personal, albeit legitimate, preoccupations.
Those two forces finally come to a head after Rana eavesdrops on her father as he decides her fate. Soon thereafter, she puts up a fight with soldiers guarding a roadblock, and she seems to lash out not only at the political forces that circumscribe her life, but also at a stifling paternalistic tradition that she can't seem to escape. During the film's most eloquent scene, Rana examines her wedding dress at a friend's house while a backhoe destroys a home next door. "They're demolishing houses on the day I want to build one," she says.
As forthright as she was at the beginning of the day, by afternoon Rana is giving full expression to her fears: Is Khalil really the man she's meant to marry? Is building a future together nothing more than futile? Is she trading life under one man's thumb for life under another's? The strength of "Rana's Wedding" is that it doesn't pretend to answer any of these questions. Instead, it portrays with equal parts lyricism and unsentimental candor the leaps of faith it takes to act without knowing all the answers.
Rana's Wedding (90 minutes, at Visions Cinema/Bistro/Lounge, in Arabic with subtitles) is not rated.
Clara Khoury shines as a young Palestinian woman trying to take control of her life against the backdrop of conflict.
