Mathijs Poppe has made an arresting and intriguing feature debut with The Jacket [+leggi anche:
trailer
intervista: Mathijs Poppe
scheda film], debuting in IDFA’s Luminous section. It’s a contained documentary character study enwrapped in numerous metafictional layers. In it, the Belgian filmmaker closely tracks a short, present day-set period in the life of Jamal Hindawi, an ageing Palestinian man living in the Shatila refugee camp, where he was born in the aftermath of the Nakba, his days enchanted by a play he’s rehearsing in which he has the lead role. In an evocative pre-title sequence, we’re dropped in as Jamal and another cast member run through its quite hypnotic dialogue and introduce its fantastical conceit: that an old, patch-laden jacket that Jamal’s character, Majbour, attempts to throw away keeps magically arriving back to him. This connection seems more on the nose and blunt than it really is, but the jacket’s provenance and existence are meant to represent nothing else but Palestine.  

In a tightly constructed 70 minutes, Poppe alights on what Jamal’s spiritual and actual homeland of Palestine precisely means to him, why it occupies such a peculiar space of yearning as he enters the latter phase of his life, and how the recreational and familial activities he enjoys furnish and nurture this. Poppe braids careful and disciplined observational documentary, following moments in Jamal’s day sequentially, to a framing device of theatre rehearsals where he’s allowed to exist transiently as someone new. And resultantly, The Jacket becomes even more interesting when the metaphorical mask he dons as “Majbour” threatens to overtake his base identity.

To be more specific, Majbour’s jacket keeps returning in the play’s dramaturgy because the various characters never forswear the eternal relevance and fading promise of Palestine (beyond Jamal, the other performers all seem to be descendants of Nakba refugees). And the jacket’s many coloured patches represent the different, variant factors that can collectively fuse as a full Palestinian identity; a very enjoyable-to-witness argument the men have (and they are all chaps, with one fellow seemingly playing Majbour’s mum) finds them vocally parsing these ideas, and bemoaning the additional albatross created by Lebanon’s own economic travails and instability. Following one rehearsal, Jamal goes out to the mountains to forage some sage with his friend Zreik, also from the production; a new, forking path to the film, which Poppe himself calls a fictional “intervention”, is laid out when a van driver they buy extra petrol from accidentally takes the jacket himself.

Poppe’s film-school education is invoked in the production notes as especially key to his artistic development; with this writer remembering his own non-fiction filmmaking training, it would be a shock to learn that he wasn’t fruitfully exposed to hours’ worth of Abbas Kiarostami. Poppe seems to have learned from the late Iranian master how dabbing a few fiction colours onto the canvas won’t undermine his film’s documentary validity: the industrious search for the jacket, which allows eclectic new participants on screen for further depth and exposition, brings Where Is the Friend’s House? to mind, whilst its easing into obvious fiction at its mid-point (with the jacket playing a more urgent, goal-driven role, like for his stage character) resembles the disorientating second-half shift in Certified Copy [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
scheda film]. Still, the really good news for Poppe is that if he’s actually guilty of stealing from the best, this resemblance perfectly congeals with his pertinent and timely tribute to Palestine.

The Jacket is a co-production by Belgium, Lebanon, the Netherlands and France, staged by Mirage, in co-production with Fulgurance, Family Affair Films, Placeless Films, Lyon Capitale TV and Al Jazeera Documentary. Its world sales are handled by Pluto Film.