The Dupes opens with a close-up of a human skeleton
and the distant figure of someone making their way across the burning desert.
The credits end with the warning: “A man without a country will have no grave
in the earth.” Tewfik Saleh’s film is wedded to death from the start, a
scorching blast from a time when the Palestine question was no less tragic but
perhaps more hopeful.
It has been almost three weeks of relentless bombing of Gaza
by Israel, with no signs of an end. More than 6,000 Palestinians have died but
there is no time to dig graves. The dire situation of Palestine charges the
already fraught atmosphere of Saleh’s 1972 film, which is playing as part of
the Restored Classics section at the Mumbai Film Festival (27
October-5 November). It’s based on a 1963 novella by the Palestinian author
Ghassan Kanafani, Men In The Sun, about three Palestinian refugees who
undertake a fraught journey from Basra in Iraq across the border to the
promised land of Kuwait.
The Dupes was one of the first films to take a
definitive pro-Palestine stance. Director Saleh was Egyptian and the film was
funded by Syria’s National Film Organization. There are no Israeli characters
in the film, though mentions of Zionists are frequent. The Arab nations are
also criticised, both as historical actors and as part of the film’s plot.
There’s a brilliant montage of still images showing political leaders in the
aftermath of the 1948 Naqba that displaced hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians. Abou Keïss’ narration over this speaks of the betrayal of his
people: “Talks, talks, talks… discussing nonsense… They bought you and sold
you. You have been waiting 10 years over their words. For nothing. You have the
Zionists before you and the traitors behind.”
Abou Keïss (Mohamed Kheir-Halouani) is the oldest of the
three refugees, the only one with clear memories of the Naqba. Assaad (Bassan
Lofti Abou-Ghazala) is the most charismatic of the trio, a young man on the run
for his part in armed struggles. And there’s baby-faced schoolboy Marwan (Saleh
Kholoki), whose father has divorced his mother and left him with the
responsibility of providing for his mother and three siblings. These three
converge on a corrupt smuggler in Basra, the closest this film comes to comic
relief (there are no song sequences either—unusual for an Arab film of that
era—though there’s a haunting a cappella refrain sung by a boatman). The
smuggler is discarded in favour of Palestinian Abou Kheizarane (Abderrahman
Alrahy), less shady and charging less to get them across the border.
There’s a catch, though. Abou Kheizarane drives a water
tanker for a rich patron. His plan hinges on the trio getting into the tanker
at the two border checkpoints and sitting quietly for the six minutes it will
take for him to get the formalities done. In the 50 degrees Celsius desert
heat, this is not a sauna (as Abou Kheizarane jokingly calls it) but a
potential death trap. The expertly ratcheted tension recalls another great film
about four men and a truck, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s The Wages Of Fear (1953).
There’s also the possible influence of The Battle Of Algiers, Gillo
Pontecorvo’s revolutionary 1966 film: in Bahgat Heider’s high-contrast black
and white photography with its haunting faces, and the way Salhi El Wadi’s
score resembles Ennio Morricone’s at times.
Through disruptive, associative editing, Saleh conveys a
sense of perpetual displacement that matches the characters’ own experiences. A
flashback with Abou Kheizarane in a hospital cuts abruptly to a black screen,
lit a second later with the striking of a match. Abou Keïss lifts a handful of
rich soil as a happy younger man; when he puts it down, he’s an old, broken
refugee. Sometimes the editing is on allegorical lines: Two separate
conversations with Assad are cross-cut, both involving foreigners and about
rats.
Throughout the film, there are reminders of how little has
changed in the lives of the Palestinian people. The radio is “a prophet… (that
sows) the seeds of nonsense”. Abou Keïss wonders whether he should have
accepted defeat and eaten “the flour of the UNRWA”. Above all, there is the
idea the film begins with: people on the move, without a country. In an
interview on 24 October in The Drift magazine, Rashid Khalidi, the
Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University, says:
“Nobody who’s kicked out is ever allowed to return. Every Arab, every
Palestinian knows that. Nobody driven into Egypt will ever come back to Gaza or
any other part of Palestine. Most of these people, of course, have already been
displaced.” The Dupes gives us
a glimpse into the lives of the first generations of displaced Palestinians, at
a time when so many others are being violently forced to accept a similar fate.
This piece appeared in Mint Lounge.
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