New York Daily News
June 26 2005
Sleeping with the enemy?
Movies, books & plays use love affairs to probe
the conflict between Islam and the West
BY CELIA MCGEE
Simon Abkarian and Joan Allen in ‘Yes.’
As far as conspiracy theories go, the idea that a racist Buckingham
Palace ordered a hit on Princess Diana and her Muslim lover in a
Paris traffic tunnel eight years ago was one of the wilder ones.
But if moviemakers, writers and big-budget musical teams are to be
believed, since 9/11 little is fair in love and war when it comes to
the romantic meeting of the Middle East and West.
With the opening this weekend of “Yes,” written and directed by Sally
Potter (“Orlando”), the entertainment industry is beginning to deal
with the difficult subject of love affairs between Muslims and
non-Muslims in the light of recent world events.
“To some extent love stories with obstacles like the ones in ‘Yes’
have been around at least as long as ‘Romeo and Juliet,'” Potter says
of her movie, which is about a passionate entanglement between an
Irish-American scientist (Joan Allen) and the refugee Lebanese
surgeon (Simon Abkarian) she meets in London, where he has been
forced into a hotel kitchen job.
But, Potter believes, the World Trade Center attacks intensified
feelings on both sides about crossing boundaries of faith and ethnic
background. She set out to make a movie that tackled a lot that has
gone on since then.
“There was so much hate in the air after Sept. 11, with Americans
portrayed as the big baddies and people from the Middle East as
mysterious demons,” she says. “I wanted to set a cross-cultural love
story against it.”
Potter is not alone. This weekend also sees the U.S. release of the
French movie “Lila Says,” in which the lovebirds are a North African
teenager and a French girl of Polish descent living with her devoutly
Catholic and seriously twisted “aunt.” Based on a 1996 literary hit,
the story’s been updated with searing references to post-9/11
tensions.
November will bring Ken Loach’s “Ae Fond Kiss,” which shows a Muslim
deejay and a Scottish piano teacher in Glasgow encountering prejudice
of all stripes when they fall in love.
To be published next month, “Desertion,” a semi-autobiographical
novel by the Booker Prize-shortlisted Abdulrazak Gurnah, should also
draw attention. It reveals how a tragic love story about an
Englishman and a local Muslim beauty in 19th-century Kenya sets the
stage for heartache in modern times.
And playwright and screenwriter Christopher Hampton is adapting the
best-selling “The White Mughal” as a musical extravaganza that’s
conscious, he has said, of today’s global atmosphere. The book is the
true tale of an 18th-century official with England’s East India
Company who converted to Islam to marry an Indian princess descended
from the prophet Muhammad.
Movies like Potter’s, says Richard Peña, program director of the Film
Society of Lincoln Center, are being made in a climate where “Arabs
have become the ultimate ‘other.’ So the question has become what
happens when one gets involved in a romantic relationship with that
‘other,’ and what does one really know about them. Is it a matter of
‘sleeping with the enemy’?”
Allen says she tried to reflect such questions in her “Yes”
performance.
“I learned about a culture that wasn’t very familiar to me,” she
says, “and my eyes were really opened. One of the crucial messages
for me was the depth of our climate of suspicion and intolerance and
threat.”
LOVE PIONEERS CHANGE
She says she has been especially moved by audiences’ warm responses
to the movie and how “it leaves people in tears. I’m scared about
what’s going on in our government right now – any dialogue has been
shut down, and dialogue is quintessentially American. This movie
should help start it up again.”
To play her sad and angry Lebanese lover, Abkarian, an Armenian
Christian, partly drew on childhood memories of when his family
briefly lived in Lebanon.
But he was also working with the way he has often found himself
unfavorably stereotyped in Europe and the U.S.
“We need to teach people that being one thing is not better than
another,” he says, “that we all need to coexist. I would end my days
if I didn’t believe we can meet in love and mutual respect.”
To that end, Potter says she fought against high odds to get “Yes”
made. Funding was hard to come by, the invasion of Iraq meant she
could no longer shoot scenes in Beirut, and new State Department
restrictions suddenly prevented Allen from filming in Cuba, another
important plot location.
“I do still believe that love can overcome hatred,” Potter says.
“Love – and hope – is the engine that pioneers change for the
better.”