By Patricia Lee Sharpe
Captain Abu Raed is a movie that confronts the great puzzle behind all imaginative literature: fiction by definition is not fact. It isn’t true because it doesn’t depict actual happenings. And yet it’s not deceptive, deceitful or destructive of the good. In fact— so to speak, it’s life-enhancing, as we learn once again, falling under the power of the accidental storyteller of a poor hillside enclave in Amman, Jordan.
We’ll meet a fairy princess. Her name is Nour, meaning “light,” and she flies in the guise of a beautiful (but not tarted up) airline pilot, so she is an honest-to-goodness Captain. Her upper middle class father wants her to come down to earth and marry and fill his house with grandchildren. Most anyone (with money) will do, it seems. We viewers cringe as we meet a parade of possible suitors. But Nour loves flying. She doesn’t want to be grounded.
Eventually she confides in Abu Raed, with whom she became acquainted when her expensive car broke down and she was forced to use the airline’s employee bus service. He tells her to follow her heart, her dreams, as he was never able to do. It’s a lovely scene that takes place on the terrace that goes with Abu Raed’s tidy little flat, a terrace with an unobstructed view of Amman sprawling over its hills—and of the open sky through which Abu Raed soars in his imagination.
Next there’s an ogre who beats women and tortures kids and must, eventually, be dealt with. The ogre appears in the guise of a frustrated father and husband who can’t make a go of his pathetic little dress shop in the city’s old bazaar. To bolster his bruised male ego, the ogre lords it over his ever fearful wife and two sons, one of whom is determined to make the younger kids in the neighborhood as miserable and despairing as he is.
Yes, Murad determines that he will show up as a fraud this old man who has never traveled to London or Rome or Tokyo or any of the exotic locales that the children experience through his affectionate narrations. Not that Abu Raed set out to fool anyone. The kids simply assumed the “obvious” when they saw him in the captain’s hat—and they were so eager for tales about his presumed travels that he did what natural storytellers do. He called upon his imagination. The children are enthralled and entranced and ever so much happier, until Murad piles them into a taxi (with money stolen from his father) to take them to the airport and show them the truth. The look of disillusionment on the children's faces is heart-breaking.
The rest of the film revolves around these questions: can the children’s faith be restored and can Abu Raed salvage the young cynic? The Princess comes into the picture, and Abu Raed must face the enraged ogre.
And that’s all I’ll say. Go and see Captain Abu Raed if you need an infusion of optimism—and realism, since we get a pretty clear picture of economics, class divisions and male-female relations in modern day Amman.
People have been flocking this past week to see the 3-D sci-fi sensation Avatar, whose formulaic plot has humans seeking salvation off planet with non-humans. The current apocalyptic mood has also produced the bleakly prophetic and unintentionally funny film The Book of Eli, which, shot in black and white, would have been cheerfuler. Both are escapist in a way that Captain Abu Raed is not. Captain Abu Raed is very much about this earth, our times and ordinary human beings who have, within themselves (despite my fairy tale typologies) all they need to make a good (or miserable) life, a hell or a heaven.
And funny glasses wouldn’t have made it any better.
The rest of the film revolves around these questions: can the children’s faith be restored and can Abu Raed salvage the young cynic? The Princess comes into the picture, and Abu Raed must face the enraged ogre.
And that’s all I’ll say. Go and see Captain Abu Raed if you need an infusion of optimism—and realism, since we get a pretty clear picture of economics, class divisions and male-female relations in modern day Amman.
People have been flocking this past week to see the 3-D sci-fi sensation Avatar, whose formulaic plot has humans seeking salvation off planet with non-humans. The current apocalyptic mood has also produced the bleakly prophetic and unintentionally funny film The Book of Eli, which, shot in black and white, would have been cheerfuler. Both are escapist in a way that Captain Abu Raed is not. Captain Abu Raed is very much about this earth, our times and ordinary human beings who have, within themselves (despite my fairy tale typologies) all they need to make a good (or miserable) life, a hell or a heaven.
And funny glasses wouldn’t have made it any better.