Tel Aviv on Fire movie review (2019)

Kais Nashif is an effortlessly natural actor, but he’s all wrong for the role of Salam, a neurotic Palestinian would-be writer tasked with tweaking the Hebrew dialect on a hokey soap (sharing the film’s title), that has proven popular on both sides of the Israeli West Bank wall. Salam got the gig likely because his uncle, Bassam (Nadim Sawalha), is the show’s producer, who eagerly awaits the top-secret finale, which he has lifted from “The Maltese Falcon.” The soap’s love triangle between a spy, Tala (Lubna Azabal), her Palestinian lover, Marwan (Ashraf Farah), and the Israeli general, Yehuda (Yousef Sweid), she aims to seduce, also appears to have been borrowed from another Hollywood classic, Hitchcock’s “Notorious,” down to the use of a key as the MacGuffin. Nashif’s affect is so flat and bereft of playfulness that his thickheaded moves verge on insufferable, such as when he asks a female border patrol officer whether the word “explosive” is insulting when used to describe women. 

To his inexplicable shock, he’s ushered before the checkpoint’s Israeli captain, Assi (Yaniv Biton), who changes his tone once he discovers that the dope works for his wife’s favorite series. Salam then digs a deeper hole for himself by claiming that he writes the show, a fib that gradually becomes fact when he starts incorporating Assi’s story notes into script revisions, lending more alleged believability to the role of Yehuda. Assi also yearns to make Yehuda a manlier love interest for Tala, which would make her—and viewers like the captain’s wife—fall for him, while combating against the program’s anti-Semitic characterizations. Why Salam feigns his writer status is a mystery, since he’s so creatively bankrupt he can’t dream up dialogue without transcribing overheard conversations or baiting Assi with “Arab hummus” in order to continue their secret collaboration. There are blatant echoes here of Woody Allen’s hilarious “Bullets Over Broadway,” with Assi serving as the Chazz Palminteri to Salam’s witless Cusack, yet he’s too much of a bully to be truly endearing. 

As the show develops added dimensions of realism under Assi’s guidance, Salam’s scenes offset devolve into a soap opera, as he relentlessly pursues an old flame, Miriam (Maisa And Elhadi), despite the fact that they are inherently incompatible. Her desire to remain in her home country clashes with Salam’s primal need to move elsewhere, far from the occupation that has traumatized him since his childhood. I never bought the sentimental progression of their subplot for an instant, especially when the only obstacles separating them arrive in the form of tired tropes like an over-the-phone misunderstanding. There is some clever production design behind the scenes, such as an overturned Eiffel Tower that serves as a backdrop to Salam’s argument with Miriam, when his plans for moving to France are inadvertently revealed. Yet it’s only as Salam’s inner creativity becomes awakened, prompting him to intuitively link various props with ideas of his own creation, does the plot threaten to catch fire.