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Works use love affairs to probe conflict between Islam and the West

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  • Works use love affairs to probe conflict between Islam and the West

    Daily News (NY)
    June 30, 2005, Thursday

    Works use love affairs to probe conflict between Islam and the West

    By Celia McGee

    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 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 Pena, 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."

    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."
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