O Jerusalem

The subject matte in O Jerusalem is better suited for a documentary instead of a fictional movie with a bunch of one-dimensional characters. The film covers the historical year of 1948 during which the state of Israel is created.

Director Milos Forman once said about message movies, “A message is important, but it should be like a fragrance. You can see a person who smells good, but you don't see the smell. You just know they smell good.” The people who made O Jerusalem clearly have never read this quote. From beginning to end, the film is permeated with peace propaganda without any new idea about how to achieve peace in the Middle East. At the end of the movie, writer-director Elie Chouraqui is apparently still worried that the audience doesn’t get his message – there is a voiceover to broadcast that peace is still possible in Middle East as long as there are people on both sides who long for peace AND a dedication before the credit to peace in Middle East. I don’t know how much thicker anyone can lay a message in a movie.

The melodrama and cheap theatrics of the film is further worsened by the miserably sentimental music score. Stephen Endelman’s score constantly pounds on the strings and our pathos. We are rarely given a second to process our own emotions without the music cue.

Except a few experienced actors such as Ian Holm (who plays Ben Gurion) and Patrick Bruel, the young actors all struggle to bring off a natural performance. JJ Feild plays Bobby, a Jewish young man caught between his duty for Israel and his friendship with an Arab man. He looks like a Jewish Jude Law but without any of Law’s acting abilities.

Overall, the whole movie is just a mess. It won’t attract any audience to see this worthy subject. Chouraqui’s last film, Harrison’s Flowers, is a realistic and touching portrait of war-torn Yugoslavia. I am surprised that the same director could have made such a terrible picture about the conflict in the Middle East. Hopefully one day someone will make an epic about the history of Israel, but O Jerusalem ain’t that movie.