The Syrian Bride

AFS@Dobie Matrimonial comedies are a staple of the cinema, bringing, as they do, divergent family members into group settings governed by heightened emotions, historic rituals, and the public avowal of private bonds. Weddings are ideal settings for clashes of both the personal and the cultural kind. Israeli filmmaker Riklas takes all this into account in this film he co-wrote with Suha Arraf, a Palestinian, about a marriage taking place in a remote outpost of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. It’s the wedding day of Mona (Khoury), a woman from a Druze family in the Heights, who is to marry a Syrian soap opera star, whom she has only seen on TV and never met. This arranged marriage is complicated by the lack of diplomatic relations between Israel and Syria. Each country’s refusal to recognize the other creates a situation in which the bride will be regarded as Syrian once she crosses the border to marry and thus never able to re-enter the Golan Heights to visit her family. This essential situation builds to an extended climax in the heavily guarded no-man’s-land between the two countries, while an incorrect stamp from an official leaves the bride without any country and a UN official scurrying impotently between both countries’ bureaucracies. Though the film is certain to resonate more strongly for Middle Eastern viewers, The Syrian Bride will be familiar to anyone caught in an avalanche of red tape. Of greater interest than Mona’s fate (it’s hard to be too concerned about the future of the bride’s union when her destiny has already been given over to an arranged marriage) are the many family members and community well-wishers who arrive on the scene. Their troubles and backstories reflect the many absudities faced by the bride and her bridegroom. There’s Mona’s father (played by her real-life father), who has just been released from jail for his political activities and is forbidden to go to the border to see his daughter get married. He, in turn, has renounced his son Hattem (Sheety), who married a Russian woman and has returned after many years to see his sister married. There’s another brother Marwan (Barhom), who’s always conducting questionable business on his cell phone and insincerely wooing the comely UN worker. Sister Amal (Abbass) appears to be the real anchor of the story – a Western-dressed woman who attempts to be the movie’s peacemaker but struggles on her own in a bad marriage to a traditionalist who won’t allow her to go back to school. Her daughter, in turn, is in love with a boy whose father is condemned by her own father as an Israeli collaborator. And on it goes. Reportedly, The Syrian Bride has been a box-office success in Israel, which is interesting since the only Israeli characters in the story are incidental. Yet while the film’s depiction of bureaucratic frustrations and familial woe are universal, the characters themselves can be difficult to warm up to and often seem as arid as their surroundings.