Something Appealing, Something Appalling
Kurdish filmmaker uses romantic comedy to address serious subjects
by Jim Ridley @countrylifeblog
The night was delightful, Jonroy remembers. But he sensed his hostess was holding something back. It turned out she was hesitant to tell a fellow Kurd—regarded among the more liberal of Muslim adherents—that her husband was Jewish.
Ever since that night, Jonroy nursed the idea of a romantic comedy that would reach across that great divide, addressing taboos about Muslims and Jews, the changing roles of women in a culture dominated by men, and issues about the region rarely covered by the Western media. The result is Jonroy’s first feature, David & Layla, which opens Friday at the Belcourt with the writer-director in attendance opening night.
Jonroy may have given the cinema its first Kurdish sex symbol: Layla (played by actress/model Shiva Rose, wife of actor Dylan McDermott), a liberated Muslim woman who is shown dancing and drinking wine for pleasure. On the street, she catches the eye of cable-TV host and incorrigible horndog David (David Moscow, best known for playing the young Tom Hanks in Big). Before long, David has fled his high-strung kickboxer girlfriend (Rescue Me’s Callie Thorne) to pursue Layla, whose modesty and self-possession only entice him more. When immigration issues force marriage onto the table, the horrified reactions of his devout Jewish parents and her distrustful Muslim uncle threaten to wreck the union.
There is much humor in David & Layla, some of it surprisingly raunchy: you’ll never hear the phrase “Mr. President” again in quite the same way. But the comedy stops mid-film for a sober interlude in which Layla, whose parents were butchered by Saddam Hussein, shows David images from the 1988 Iraqi genocide of Kurdish civilians at Halabja. This sequence, Jonroy says, is the reason he wanted to make the film.
“I wanted to make Layla so desirable and lovable that she can show this to David and people will listen,” Jonroy says. The film carries a dedication to his sister, whose husband was a victim of Ba’athist violence, and to his younger brother, a civil political resistor who was abducted by Saddam’s secret agents after they found a printing press hidden behind his bathroom tiles. His remains were found in 2003 in a mass grave at Abu Ghraib.
“I compare it to a car accident,” Jonroy says. “One day you lose a leg or an arm, and you live with it. You go forward; you have laughter, you have weddings. People accuse the West of causing problems around the world, but ironically it’s in the West that immigrants are allowed to express themselves, not just with freedom of speech, but freedom of imagination. It would be impossible to make a film like David & Layla in my country.”
Jonroy will speak after the 7 p.m. screening Friday at the Belcourt. Tickets are $13 and available at tickets.belcourt.org.
