Issa (The Crown’s Salim Daw) is a 60-year-old bachelor. Every night, he takes his fishing boat out to sea and brings his paltry catch to the market the next day. At the same market, his heart is captured by Siham (Succession’s Hiam Abbass), a middle-aged widow who works alongside her divorced daughter Leila (Maisa Abd Elhadi) as seamstresses for a struggling clothing store. As Issa tries to muster up the courage to propose to Siham, he finds in his fishing net a nearly lifesize antique statue of Apollo, the Greek god of light – equipped with a fully erect penis.
Its title echoes Alain Resnais’s 1959 classic Hiroshima, Mon Amour, which follows a pair of lovers across a bomb-devastated city. But Gaza Mon Amour does not indulge itself in melancholic discussions about the traumas of war. Instead, the film is a gentle reminder that love is a flower that can bloom for anyone, at any age and in any place.
With surly visuals underlined by a plainspoken cinematography and a muted colour palette, Gaza Mon Amour traces the streets and the houses its characters frequent. The sidewalks filled with rubble, the rooms draped in darkness due to daily power cuts all seem to suggest pain and suffering. And yet the characters radiate with enchanting romance and absurdist comedy; their dialogue brims with bickering and banter about old laundry and going to the loo in one’s dreams.
Daw lends Issa a childlike bashfulness – like a teen experiencing their first crush. The old fisherman dances in his kitchen after striking up his first conversation with Siham. “I’ve decided to get married,” he confides in his younger sister Manal (Manal Awad), who is complaining about his ripped undergarments. Aside from his sincerity and vulnerability, Issa is also devilishly charming. As authorities question him about the phallic statue, Issa’s impish rebuttals puncture what would otherwise be a terrifying encounter.
Meanwhile, Abbass is luminous as the resolute Siham. In her eyes, we see hope, joy, resentment and guilt. Behind her stoicism is a veil of melancholy nobody can see through, except perhaps her daughter Leila – who is dismissive. As Siham stares longingly at the portrait of her late husband, her daughter struggles to keep her dream of university education ablaze.
Dreams permeate every gloomy frame of the film. Political turmoils are only alluded to obliquely in Gaza Mon Amour – and perhaps most poignantly through the characters’ unrealised ambitions. “When will this shitty life be over?” utters Samir (George Iskandar), Issa’s friend, as he fantasises of escaping to Europe with his family. Issa, too, reminisces about how “clean and wide” the sea was as he remembers his first love, who often skipped school to walk on the beach.
Despite his pragmatism, Issa still secretly dreams of a sea that stretches further than 10km from shore, a sea where he does not need a permit to roam, a sea where he can take the woman he loves without fearing gunfire from Israeli naval patrols. The film grants him a love story after all, daring to depict a Gaza where the sound of bombardments can be drowned out by the pitter-patter on an umbrella shielding two wistful lovers from the rain.
• Gaza Mon Amour is streaming in Australia on SBS On Demand and available to rent in the US. For more recommendations of what to stream in Australia, click here
