J Paul Johnson
Even the happiest of holidays, as the season tends to remind us, can be fraught with crises and conflicts bubbling under and up to the surface. Oscar-nominated Palestinian writer-director Scandar Copti’s feature Happy Holidays, a sociopolitical melodrama echoing the work of Douglas Sirk, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Asghar Farhadi, uses the season to examine the complexities of Israeli Arab life through a lens focused on four characters whose fates and foibles intersect. It’s a quiet and compelling drama, forgoing loud revelations or showy climaxes for subtle reflection and insight.
Intergenerational and interfamilial, Copti’s feature is also inter-, or more precisely trans-national, a Palestine-Germany-Italy-France-Qatar co-production with dialogue in both Arabic and Hebrew. After its September premiere at Venice, where it won the Best Screenplay award in the Orizzonti section, it then earned the Étoile d’Or, at the 21st Marrakech International Film Festival, where two of the film’s actresses—Wafaa Aoun and Manar Shehab—were co-presented the Best Actress award.
Copti organizes Happy Holidays‘ narrative into discrete and achronological sequences, demarcated by title cards, each of them focusing primarily on an individual character—though each of them and their conflicts are inextricably intertwined. At the film’s start, it is Rami (Toufic Dainal), a single Palestinian man from Haifa, whose turmoil is front and center. His Jewish girlfriend, Shirley (Shani Dahari), is pregnant and refuses to discuss the potential abortion on which they had presumably agreed. It’s her body and her choice, but Rami is shut out from any conversation and then completely blocked from her life; soon he cannot even locate her whereabouts, and his attempts end up in a severe beating and warning from a couple of masked goons telling him to leave her alone.
Rami’s rejection and injuries couldn’t come at a worse time for his family. His parents are facing a financial crisis, one exacerbated both by his father Fouad’s (Imad Hourani) apparent mismanagement of the family business and the upcoming wedding of one of their daughters (Sophie Awaada). Rami’s mother, Hanan (Aoun), refuses to cut a single corner in regard to the wedding planning, lest she lose face in her social circles: the family’s social reputation, at least to her, is dangling on the precipice.
Another of Hanan’s daughters, Fifi (Shehab), the outwardly more vibrant and beautiful of them, is dating a handsome doctor whose family runs in the same social circles. Fifi, who had been celebrating Purim at her university in Jerusalem, is recovering from an accident. She’s been enjoying a newfound freedom at school, but in the wake of the accident she is now under even greater scrutiny from her conservative parents. Hanan also needs to collect from her insurance company to pay the medical bills, but Fifi is keeping her medical history a secret from her family. Hanan’s need to resolve the situation, like her desperation to provide her other daughter an elegant and unaffordable wedding, simply makes matters worse and threatens to expose a secret that will even further jeopardize her family’s fragile social standing.
While Rami is shut out of his girlfriend’s life, meanwhile, she seeks help from her sister, Miri (Merav Mamorsky), a nurse who is far more caring with her patients than her family members. Miri isn’t much interested in helping Shirley or for that matter, even her own daughter, who is suffering from depression. This particular narrative thread is, for what it’s worth, less interconnected with the others—her family is unrelated to Hanan’s and boyfriend Rami has been kept at a distance. It’s also, for those same reasons, less interesting to the narrative as a whole, as Miri’s own decisions and sentiments seem based either in simple prejudice or remain mostly enigmatic.
As the narrative unfolds, it eventually becomes clear that the events depicted are achronological, though Copti’s purpose in doing so feels at best oblique. Rather than giving viewers an omniscient or even informed perspective, his technique in limiting perspective and re-organizing narrative events seems designed mostly to present viewers a position kind of like that of a given member of an extended family, never knowing any full truth and learning about past events only in fits and fragments. That’s an approach that works a bit better in theory than in practice, though, as for long stretches of Happy Holidays‘ narrative one is kept in the dark as to certain characters’ motivations.
In the film’s final act, it’s the most traditional and conventional of the narrative threads—Fifi’s burgeoning relationship with Dr. Walid (Raed Burbura), threatened by her secret past that her mother unknowingly risks exposing—that dominates. Others, such as her family’s social fortunes, Shirley’s pregnancy, or Miri’s daughter’s depression, fall by the wayside. Each of them are subject to the myriad political, racial, social, and economic forces that reward and punish, which is the film’s primary thesis; however, that same focus robs most of the characters of their agency; they are pawns, so to speak, moved by forces they do not see and cannot truly know. There’s a resolution of sorts for Fifi, but for all the energy given to these other plots, they are given much less so.
Happy Holidays‘ approach to casting follows that of Copti’s prior Oscar-nominated film Amaji, using non-professional actors in pursuit of authenticity. Copti calls this the “Singular Drama” method of evoking empathy for each character and has cast a doctor as a doctor, a nurse as a nurse, a businessman as a businessman, and so on. Of the cast, Aoun as Hanan, so put upon by societal expectation, and Shehab as Fifi, harboring a secret guilt, make excellent impressions—it’s no surprise they co-earned the top acting award at Marrakesh. Whether the approach in general is better than or merely different from casting trained professionals is unknowable, but it’s not without effect.
Happy Holidays works against some prevailing themes and tropes in Palestinian cinema. It is, except for Rami’s beating, nonviolent. There is no direct reference to occupation, displacement, nor diaspora. Its singular focus on intergenerational, interfamilial drama echoes a tradition of melodrama working through Sirk, Fassbender, and Farhadi, exploring the diversity of a family unit in the microcosm of a larger community where issues of gender inequality, hegemonic patriarchy, and generational conflict are brought into focus. Its neo-Neorealist approach to casting seems more in harmony with its general thesis than does its nonlinear narrative, but regardless, Happy Holidays provides a deep and keen insight on the conflicts contemporary Palestinians face.
