Recommended

MARRIED TO THE MARRIED: Clara Khoury (left) and Hiam Abbass as part of The Syrian Bride's extended clan.

In The Syrian Bride, every character is pulled in at least two directions at once. (The script, fittingly, was co-written by Riklis and Palestinian Suha Arraf.) For Mona, who has already been married once, there's the tension between starting a new life and leaving the old behind—a clean break, since once she assumes Syrian nationality she will not be allowed back into the Golan, and her family will be unable to visit her. But then, her family is already divided, split by colonial borders and riven by internal conflicts. In a scene at once absurd and poignant, Mona's father, Hammed (played by Khoury's real-life father Makram Khoury), stands on a hillside with a bullhorn, exchanging gossip across a shallow valley crisscrossed by concrete and barbed wire; across the way, in Syria, are relatives he'll never see, their faces indistinct in long shot.

Mona's elder sister, Amal (the splendid Hiam Abbass), still lives in the Golan, and two of her brothers make the return trip: Marwan (Ashraf Barhom), an oily, energetic wheeler-dealer who gives his occupation as "business!" and Hattem (Eyad Sheety), who has been estranged from his father since his marriage to a blond Russian. (Marwan, too, has an eye for European women, but he swears he'll marry a local girl when the time comes.) It's been years since the family has been together, but their physical proximity only lays bare the distances between them.

Although Mona is The Syrian Bride's central character, in the sense that its events revolve around her, she's often a mute or unseen presence. It's Amal, charged with managing the family's internal conflicts, as well as a few of her own, who emerges as the movie's most resonant voice. Abbass, the star of Satin Rouge, and recently seen in Munich and The Gate of the Sun, is an inescapably regal presence, but she radiates sadness as well as strength; she's a queen in a culture that only recognizes kings. Dressed in sweaters and skirts (and at one point stripped down to her bra), she's an emancipated woman trying to keep peace with her past. Although the movie's air is often filled with the sound of quarreling men, it's most poignantly concerned with the fate of their sisters and wives. There's Mona, who wonders if by going from the occupied territories to an arranged marriage, she's "going from one jail to another." There's Amal's daughter, whose love affair with the son of an Israeli collaborator is strictly forbidden by her overbearing father (Adnan Trabshi). And there's Amal, marooned in a joyless marriage with a man who is more concerned with his friends' gossip about his independent-minded wife than with the state of their union. Oddly, it's the last that seems to concern Amal the least; she seems to know how to fix everyone's life except her own. It's no surprise when an acceptance letter to social work school turns up in her mail, or that her husband objects when it does.

The Syrian Bride is a political movie by dint of its setting, but Riklis focuses on the way politics shapes individual lives. When the characters do reach out for aid from above, Riklis shows us phones ringing in empty offices—in Damascus as well as Jerusalem. The U.N., the Israeli police and the immigration authorities on each side of the border are all represented by single figures, each with their own lightly sketched problems. The U.N. official has recently broken off an affair with Marwan; the Israeli passport control man is worried for his son, who was visiting the site of a suicide bombing. The effect is not paint-by-numbers characterization but the sense that every one of them is drawn in different directions, their lives bisected by borders they may not even see. The movie's last act, an abstract playlet in the vein of Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention, sends the haggard U.N. official ping-ponging between the Israeli and Syrian sides of the border, desperately trying to arrange Mona's passage with increasingly bleak results. As it comes to a conclusion, the movie humbly but boldly suggests that all that is needed to transgress borders is an act of human will, and the vision to see the way ahead.

The Syrian Bride

Directed by Eran Riklis A Koch Lorber release Opens Friday at Ritz at the Bourse