Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette's searing drama Inch'Allah assumes the perspective of Chloé (Evelyne Brochu), a Quebecois physician stationed in a UN-backed medical clinic in post-Intifada, Desert Storm-era Ramallah. She spends her days amid hellish conditions, tending to the medical and emotional needs of Palestinian captives and bearing a burden that far outstrips the capacities of one individual. Post-sundown, the young woman regularly retires to her home in Jerusalem, where she enjoys the local nightlife with a friend named Ava (Sivan Levy). As the days pass, Chloé finds herself drawn into the lives of an angry Palestinian activist named Faysal (Yousef Sweid) and his sister Rand (Sabrina Ouazani) -- an expectant mother whose husband awaits trial and sentencing in an Israeli jail.
As Barbeau-Lavalette's premiere feature Le Ring demonstrated, the writer/director is not only comfortable with situations that lack an easy resolution -- she thrives on them. In that debut picture, we witnessed a preteen struggling to fight the ills wrought by poverty and making increasingly desperate attempts to escape that were crippled by a child's naiveté. In Inch'Allah, the artist broadens her focus and heightens her ambition: Here, her concerns are not the socioeconomic disadvantages plaguing a single familial unit, but the religious, political, and cultural tumult that has torn an entire region to shreds since Israel's founding in 1948 -- and that seems fated to continue until the end of time.
In order to work properly onscreen, the story of Inch'Allah necessitates even greater despair and hopelessness than Le Ring did. In this sense, the writer/director proves herself worthy of the subject: If, in Barbeau-Lavalette's prior film, we at least had something tangible to hope for, as well as a ray of optimism in the denouement, in Inch'Allah we get no such satisfaction and that's entirely appropriate. At the outset of the story, Chloé exudes what may initially seem like the most appropriate response to the Middle Eastern conflict: political neutrality. Guided by UN policies, the doctor approaches her days at the medical clinic as completely unbiased, unattached, and unwilling to take sides on the Palestinian-Israeli issue. Yet Barbeau-Lavalette shows us the futility of this choice. Recalling a central theme of Haskell Wexler's 1969 drama Medium Cool, Inch'Allah suggests that a lack of politicization is synonymous with reactionary behavior, and that the only appropriate response to the ongoing tragedies is to pick a side. Yet when circumstances finally force Chloé to take a stand, it also means alienating tens of thousands of people who are culturally, theologically, and socioculturally opposed to her position. Accordingly, the side that Chloé finally does take emerges as no less immune to violence than the other. In other words, the film gives us a vile and satanic equation with no solution other than death itself.
Inch'Allah evinces directorial maturation in terms of the way that Barbeau-Lavalette handles onscreen emotion as well: Though we get the same trademark avoidance of sentimentality that characterized Le Ring and her court-métrage Ina Litovski, Inch'Allah's emotional structure is far trickier than either of those prior films. She builds her narrative around a character who is initially insouciant, and makes us one with Chloé so that we also, at first, have nothing clear to latch onto, no palpable emotions; the tapestry-like chaos onscreen for the first 45 minutes or so has a numbing effect that defies us to care. In one brilliant, pivotal sequence that occurs in mid-movie, however -- a scene involving the birth of Rand's baby -- the emotional barriers suddenly come crashing down for us at the same moment that they collapse for Chloé. It's a tearjerking, heartrending sequence, and all the more effective because the film earns this payoff after letting the emotions well up inside of us and Chloé's character for more than an hour. Everything following this has a devastating effect, because we realize in retrospect how jaded we were before.
There is something transcendent, even magisterial, in the technique that lies at the center of this picture -- Barbeau-Lavalette's ability to gently guide us down a path of shifting perception and emotion along with her central character. We've all been inundated with the atrocities, crimes against humanity, and endless cycles of bloodshed in the Middle East -- overcome to the point of almost complete collective anesthetization. It takes a very special film to force us to see the cataclysm in a new light, yet Inch'Allah does exactly that. Barbeau-Lavalette has created more than a conventional drama; though the movie's surface seems low-key and restrained, beneath it lies an unmistakable scream of anguish, of rage, of horror, that violently rips through one's preconditioned responses toward the Middle East and calls with utter sanity and clarity for an end to the madness now plaguing Earth's most beleaguered region. As such, this beautifully and cunningly crafted motion picture is long overdue.