‘Happy Holidays’: Venice Review

Dir/scr: Scandar Copti. Palestine/Germany/France/Italy. 2024. 124mins.

The daily news cycle brings us endless stories of inter-tribal conflict. Sometimes the tribes are nation states, sometimes ethnic or religious groups, sometimes political blocs. What the conflict narrative invariably misses, or glosses over, is how those tribes police their own members. That’s the needle-sharp focus of Palestinian filmmaker Scandar Copti’s compelling new drama, which places an Arab-speaking Israeli family at the hub of a wheel of intersecting stories.

A globally resonant drama

They and their Jewish neighbours are ‘good people’, yet we realise with a growing sense of dread that some of them are capable of doing terrible things in the name of what they consider to be right. They are locked into a holding pattern of lies and denial – overlain with a further level of coercion common to both sides, the power of the patriarchy. 

Audiences outside of the writer-director’s homeland (Copti is an Israel-born Palestinian) may miss some local nuances, such as the fact that the film’s central Karam family appear to be Arab-speaking Christians. (In Venice, where the film plays in Horizons, the subtitles indicated when Arabic or Hebrew was being spoken). But Happy Holidays doesn’t get derailed by details. It’s a globally resonant drama that will appeal to cineastes with a taste for tough, gritty, thought-provoking stories.

Following Copti’s writer-director’s Oscar-nominated 2009 debut Ajami, the film is further proof of the writer/director’s ability to coax powerful turns out of non-professional actors. These authentic performances dispel, for the most part, a certain flow-chart quality to a script which in essence offers up series of variations on how societies exert coercive control, and how that pressure destroys lives. In the family, in the street, even in the stories a kindergarten teacher tells her young charges, characters are bullied and cajoled out of their freedom to be different.

While Copti’s script may be a little schematic, it’s also a bravura example of how to deepen understanding by shifting points of view. A brief prologue introduces us to the film’s central character Fifi, a young woman with a lust for life played by ethical fashion entrepreneur Manar Shehab. When she suffers a whiplash injury after a minor car crash, she’s dismayed to see her disapproving parents and brother turn up at the emergency room. Word somehow got out – because in this claustrophobic place, clan cohesion trumps a person’s right to privacy. Then words get ugly. “Wipe that filth off your face”, Fifi’s otherwise mild-mannered mother Hanan (a terrific Wafaa Aoun) hisses at her in the car on the way home, nodding at her daughter’s make up.

After that prelude, Happy Holidays cycles through three more intertwined stories, each one introduced by a sardonic chapter heading (one is called ‘The Not So Peculiar Story of Shirley and her Baby’), before returning to the story of Fifi, who has a real chance for happiness with young doctor Walid (Raed Burbara) – until he finds out some things about her. “I thought I was in love with a normal girl,” says Walid towards the end, all tearful with male righteousness. Yet Fifi is perfectly normal - it’s Walid who is determined to to read her as something she isn’t.

Hanan also hates it when the world doesn’t conform to her vision of it. When her weak-willed husband drags the family into a financial catastrophe, she puts on an increasingly desperate smile and tries to ignore it. This is a world in which anomalies that don’t compute – like a Jewish air hostess who is carrying the child of her Arab lover – are treated as beyond the event horizon. When they are unavoidable, they become stains that need removing.

Shot in a series of unglamorous urban locations, Happy Holidays is relentless, though the tension slips just a little in the overlong final section. It lays bare a society in which surveillance, suspicion and denunciation are embedded on the interpersonal level. Even a psychiatrist who pays lip service to patient confidentiality has no qualms telling a mother he thinks her teenage daughter’s depression may be a simple case of draft dodging. If the film doesn’t always mesh its two main strands – tough family drama and reflections on the state of a nation – it does so often enough and passionately enough to impress.