Une bouteille à la mer (2012)
Directed by Thierry Binisti

Film Review

An emotionally involving but far from subtle allegory on the Israel-Palestine situation, Une bouteille à la mer captivates mainly through the authentic performances from the two leads, Agathe Bonizter and Mahmoud Shalaby, and its realistic portrayal of everyday life in the region, bouts of normality punctuated by terrorist attacks and other atrocities.  The film is directed with somewhat more flair than is evident in the screenwriting by Thierry Binisti, his second feature for cinema, after L'Outremangeur (2003).  For the past two decades, Binisti has had a productive career in French television and has directed around twenty TV movies and television series, although he has yet to make much of an impact in cinema.

The film is based on Une bouteille dans la mer de Gaza, a novel by the French writer Valérie Zenatti, who spent her adolescent years in Israel and was profoundly marked by what she experienced.  Zenatti contributed to the screenplay, having previously scripted Alain Tasma's Ultimatum (2009), adapted from another of her books.  Une bouteille à la mer isn't so much a love story as an allegorical fable on the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock.  Evidently, the moral of the film is that the impasse can only resolved by dialogue, by the two sides talking to one another and learning to appreciate each other's point of view.  

The two main characters Tal and Naïm are clearly meant to represent the two states, Israel and Palestine, separated by concrete and generations of mutual loathing.  When Naïm receives Tal's message in a bottle his reaction is predictably derisive.  A gesture of peace from a naïve teenager can only ring hollow when you are sitting on the other side of the fence with missiles and bullets trained on you day and night.  But then something wonderful and unexpected happens.  Naïm and Tal manage to put their cultural differences to one side and open a dialogue, through the modern miracle that is the internet.  Gradually, they start to see things from the other person's point of view and develop a mutual trust.  The realities of living in what is effectively a war zone threaten the promising entente, but the desire that Naïm and Tal both have to reach out and make contact with the other side keeps the e-mails zipping back and forth and their friendship blossoms.  Naïm even takes the trouble to learn French (a sign of commitment if ever there was one) and ends up quoting poems by Jacques Prévert.

It is easy to criticise the film for its simplicity and the way it sidesteps the complex and seemingly intractable politics that have kept Israel and Palestine apart for generations.  Yet the film's simplicity and naïve optimism are its main charm.   Naïm and Tal do not represent the present, which admittedly does feel depressingly hopeless, but a future when individuals on both sides make contact with one another and create a climate in which it is possible for the leaders of Israel and Palestine to talk to one another and resolve the futile dispute over territory.  Une bouteille à la mer is not about how things are now, it is a heartfelt expression of how things should be - a song of hope for a future in which Israelis and Palestinians can settle their differences and live side by side not as enemies, but as committed allies.  After all, no one expected the Berlin Wall to come tumbling down in 1989.  Why shouldn't the West Bank Barrier go the same way?

Film Synopsis

Tal is a young French woman who has settled in Jerusalem with her family.  She is 17 and has reached the age of her first adult experiences - her first love, her first cigarette, her first terrorist attack.  When a suicide bomber blows up a café near to where she lives, Tal writes a letter to an imaginary Palestinian in which she asks some pointed questions and refuses to accept that Israel and Palestine must go on being divided by hatred.  She puts the letter in a bottle and asks her brother to throw it into the sea, near to Gaza.  A few weeks later, Tal receives a reply from someone named Gazaman...