Chronic depression is an awfully difficult theme to get right in cinema: if the sufferer is too glum, it risks alienating the audience. That’s not an issue for Maha Haj’s Mediterranean Fever, since the director-writer is careful to show Waleed, her main character, as a likeable guy and a good father. Yet unlike Aftersun, which captures a subjective moment without the need for exposition, Mediterranean Fever aims to deliver substantial amounts of information in a haphazardly humorous way with the story of a suicidal guy who tries to convince his shady new neighbor to kill him. “A coward is afraid of death,” Waleed informs his potential assassin, who replies to the contrary: “A coward is afraid of life.” Not the most original formulation, and far too simplistic for an exchange that’s meant to be deep. The film works hard to keep sympathies high, yet it doesn’t hold up to examination, notwithstanding Haj’s win for best screenplay in Cannes’ 2022 Un Certain Regard. Wider distribution is unlikely after its very respectable festival life runs its course, though as Palestine’s Oscar submission it will continue to generate interest.
Haj worked as an art director for Elia Suleiman and as with her debut feature Personal Affairs she incorporates soupçons of Suleiman’s trademark style within more traditionally narrative-driven stories, occasionally playing with a certain deadpan manner without being committed to its use. Waleed (Amer Hlehel, also in Personal Affairs) and his family live in a nice apartment in Haifa looking out to the sea. A former bank clerk, he’s rejected office life to become a novelist, but the writing has stalled, and his depression is growing. His supportive wife Ola (Anat Hadid) works as a nurse during the day so he’s the one who gets their kids, Nour (Cynthia Saleem) and Shams (Samir Elias), ready for school and is the parent called if there’s a problem, such as Shams’ chronic stomach upsets.
Waleed is seeing a shrink (Raheeq Haj Yihia) but after two years there’s no breakthrough and he refuses to consider medication: he’s given up on life but is afraid his kids will be stigmatized if he commits suicide. Then he gets new neighbors, Jalal (Ashraf Farah), his wife Raneen (Shaden Kanboura) and their two daughters. At first the rough-edged Jalal is just annoying, playing his music too loud, being all buddy-buddy too quickly, and appearing to be dismissive of the Palestinian cause. But then Waleed realizes Jaleel is involved in some less-than-halal activities and owes a hefty sum to impatient loan sharks. Waleed hits upon an idea: if he gets close to Jalal, maybe his neighbor could recommend a hitman to bump him off. Or better yet, maybe Jalal will do the dirty work himself.
Let’s break this down for a moment. Waleed, afraid of the stigma attached to suicide, befriends his neighbor under false pretenses and then tries to convince him to murder him. He uses Jalal without ever imagining what it might do to him, not just legally but emotionally. His affection for his kids is clear and demonstrable, yet he refuses to take medication which might alleviate his depression and therefore spare his children the pain of his unnatural death. Despite the script working hard to make the guy outwardly sympathetic, the truth is he’s blindingly selfish, not because he wants to end his life but because he treats suicide as an early, rather than final, option. The film’s black humor may be designed in part to brush aside these concerns, yet a few chuckles don’t dissolve the underlying seriousness of the subject, nor does it seem that Haj wants it to function in that way.
The title refers to a potential (incorrect) diagnosis given to Shams – Mediterranean Fever really is a genetic autoinflammatory disorder – though by giving her film this name, the director appears to want to make some kind of statement about the region. Shots of older stone structures in Haifa from before 1948, when the city was a thriving Arab-majority port, reinforce this element, as does Waleed’s developed sense of Palestinian nationalism, yet Haj keeps this as a subtheme, without integrating the Occupation and Israel’s treatment of its Arab minority within Waleed’s depression.
Top cinematographer Antoine Héberlé nicely works within Haj’s preferred style of discreet camera movements and self-contained shots, where low-key lighting in the interiors contrast with the expansive, limitless vista just outside Waleed’s balcony. Véronique Lange’s measured editing is equally attuned to the film’s delicate if not always successful balance between gravity and humor.
Director: Maha Haj
Screenplay: Maha Haj
Cast: Amer Hlehel, Ashraf Farah, Anat Hadid, Samir Elias, Cynthia Saleem, Shaden Kanboura,
Yousef Abu Warda, Sobhi Hosary, Thuraya Younis, Nihaya Bshara, Raheeq Haj Yihia, Samar Qubty, Kareem Ghneim, Bashir Nahra, Adam Farraj
Producers: Baher Agbariya, Thanassis Karathanos, Martin Hampel, Juliette Lepoutre, Pierre Menahem, Marios Piperides, Janine Teerling
Executive producer: Fayçal Hassaïri
Cinematography: Antoine Héberlé
Production designer: Andreas Antoniou
Costume designer: Hamada Atallah
Editing: Véronique Lange
Music: Munder Odeh
Sound: Adrian Baumeister, Florian Marquardt
Production companies: Pallas Film (Germany), Still Moving (France), AMP Filmworks (Cyprus), Majdal Films (Palestine), in association with Metafora Production (Qatar)
World sales: Luxbox
Venue: Palm Springs (also Cannes 2022, Sydney 2022, Melbourne 2022, Hong Kong 2022, Sarajevo 2022)
In Arabic, Hebrew
108 minutes
