Film PricesMinimum Credit/Debit charge of $5.00
- $ 7.50 adults
- $ 6.50 Students and Seniors
- $ 5.50 Matinees
- $ 5 Children 12 and under
The Lemon Tree - Not Rated - 106 min - Flat
A = Auditorium
S = Screening RoomSalma Zidane (Hiam Abbass), the proud, handsome 45-year-old Palestinian woman at the center of “Lemon Tree,” an allegory of Israeli-Palestinian strife, has the misfortune of living in the wrong place at the wrong time. Widowed for 10 years, with a son in the United States, Salma earns a meager living from a lemon grove on the Green Line separating Israel from the occupied territories of the West Bank. The grove has been in her family for 50 years. Her solitary life suddenly turns upside down when the Israeli defense minister, Israel Navon (Doron Tavory), moves into a fancy new house that abuts the grove. Overnight a watchtower is constructed, and security guards and soldiers begin patrolling the property. No sooner have Navon and his beautiful, cultured wife, Mira (Rona Lipaz-Michael), moved into the new house than Salma receives an official letter informing her that the grove poses a security threat from terrorists hiding among the trees; as a military necessity they must be uprooted. The letter, which Salma has translated because she neither speaks nor writes Hebrew, loftily offers to compensate her for her loss while mentioning that because of recent legislation, there is no legal obligation to do so. She weeps at the news. Thus begins an escalating war of words and of wills. After Salma argues her case before a military tribunal and is rebuffed, she takes her campaign to the Israeli Supreme Court. She also refuses to accept a decree that the grove is off limits and, at the risk of being shot, occasionally climbs the fence put up around it to water the trees and gather lemons. Some of the trees are already beginning to die. As word of her campaign to keep the grove spreads, her case becomes a news media cause célèbre that threatens to embarrass Navon. “Lemon Tree,” directed by the Israeli filmmaker Eran Riklis, whose 2004 movie, “The Syrian Bride,” explored Israeli-Arab border tensions, is also a wrenching, richly layered feminist allegory as well as a geopolitical one. As such, its details are not to be taken too literally. The screenplay by Mr. Riklis and Suha Arraf, the Palestinian-Israeli woman who wrote “The Syrian Bride” with Mr. Riklis, finds a deep commonality between Salma and Mira. Victimized by patriarchal attitudes toward war and sex, both begin to break the rules. Mira, whose marriage to Navon has withered, strongly suspects that he is philandering and begins acting like a prisoner in her own home. Addressing the issue of the grove, Navon speaks the same evasive double talk that he does with Mira in discussing their marriage. When, out of frustration, she gives an interview expressing her sympathy with Salma, Navon is so infuriated that he pressures her to sign a paper taking back her words. Salma is even more defiant. She develops an increasingly intense relationship with Ziad Daud (Ali Suliman), the handsome, divorced 34-year-old Palestinian lawyer who pleads her cause. Their bond is public enough to incur the wrath of a boorish neighbor, Abu Camal (Makram J. Khoury), who sternly admonishes Salma for desecrating the memory and honor of her husband, whose portrait still hangs on the wall. Sexually the film is very circumspect. As Mira and Salma study each other through the fence separating their properties, the film implies that the combined strength of two principled women is still no match for the powers that be. Ms. Abbass’s Salma is particularly impressive. With this movie and “The Visitor,” for which Richard Jenkins received an Oscar nomination, she has emerged as a formidable international presence with the magnetism of a Middle Eastern Lena Olin. Although “Lemon Tree” doesn’t overtly take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it portrays the Israelis, who wield more military power, as abusive and arrogant in the way that any country with superior weapons and armies inevitably appears. The security guards on Navon’s property behave like strutting goons — only too eager to turn their guns on the first thing that moves — or clowns, like the watchtower guard nicknamed Quickie, who dozes off while on duty. For as long as these war games go on, this movie suggests, the strife will continue.(In Arabic, Hebrew, French, and English w/ subtitles) Review by Stephen Holden, nytimes.com
A = Auditorium
S = Screening RoomIt was a desperate business, and "Hunger" is a desperate film. It concerns the fierce battle between the Irish Republican Army and the British state, which in 1981 led to a hunger strike in which 10 IRA prisoners died. The first of them was Bobby Sands, whose agonizing death is seen with an implacable level gaze in the closing act of the film. If you do not hold a position on the Irish Republican cause, you will not find one here. "Hunger" is not about the rights and wrongs of the British in Northern Ireland, but about inhumane prison conditions, the steeled determination of IRA members like Bobby Sands, and a rock and a hard place. There is hardly a sentence in the film about Irish history or politics, and only two extended dialogue passages: one a long debate between Sands and a priest about the utility or futility of a hunger strike, the other a doctor's detailed description to Sands' parents about the effect of starvation on the human body. There is not a conventional plot to draw us from beginning to end. Instead, director Steve McQueen, an artist who employs merciless realism, strikes three major chords. The first involves the daily routine of a prison guard (Stuart Graham), who is emotionally wounded by his work. The second involves two other prisoners (Brian Milligan and Liam McMahon) who participate in the IRA prisoners' refusal to wear prison clothes or bathe. The third involves the hunger strike. This is clear: Neither side will back down. Twice we hear Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher describing the inmates of the Maze prison in Belfast not as political prisoners but criminals. The IRA considers itself political to the core. The ideology involved is not even mentioned in the extraordinary long dialogue scene, mostly in one shot, between Sands and a priest (Liam Cunningham) about whether a hunger strike will have the desired effect. The priest, worldly, a realist, on very civil terms with Sands, never once mentions suicide as a sin; he discusses it entirely in terms of its usefulness. Sands thinks starvation to death will have an impact. The priest observes that if it does, Sands will by then be dead. His willingness to die reflects the bone-deep beliefs of Irish Republicans; recall the Irish song lyric, "And always remember, the longer we live, the sooner we bloody well die." Sands' death is shown in a tableaux of increasing bleakness. It is agonizing, yet filmed with a curious painterly purity. It is alarming to note how much weight the actor Michael Fassbender lost; he went from 170 to 132 pounds. His dreams or visions or memories toward the end, based on a story he told the priest, would have been more effective if handled much more briefly. Did the hunger strike succeed? After the remorseless death toll climbed to 10, Thatcher at last relented, tacitly granting the prisoners political recognition, although she refused to say so out loud. She was called the Iron Lady for a reason. Today there is peace in Northern Ireland. The island nation is still divided. Bobby Sands is dead. The priest has his conclusions; the dead man has his, or would if he were alive. Review by Roger Ebert, suntimes.com
Click here for a printable movie schedule.
Click here for a past films.
The Golden Globes The Internet Movie Database Internet Archive: Movie Collection
(Fast Connection Required)Turner Classic Movies If you have a favorite Movie Resource, please send us an email and let us know. If our distinguished review panel agrees, the link to the resource will be added to our list.
Myrna Loy Center
15 North Ewing
Helena, Montana 59601
Office: (406) 443-0287 Fax: (406) 443-6620
myrnaloy@mt.net
Copyright © 2000-2007, Myrna Loy Center. All rights reserved.
Privacy Notice
