May In The Summer

May In The Summer very much revolves around its writer-director-star, Cherien Dabis, who is following up her successful 2009 debut, Amreeka, which was about the experience of Middle Eastern immigrants in America with a film whose characters go in the opposite direction.

Ms. Dabis plays May, a New York-based American author whose trip to her childhood home of Amman in Jordan for her wedding to a Palestinian American academic goes awry. Her parents (Hiam Abbass and Bill Pullman) have been divorced for 8 years but her mother, a devout Arab Christian is still agonizing over the break-up and disapproves of her daughter marrying a Muslim.  Her estranged father has married a beautiful young Indian who finds out that he is having an affair.  Meanwhile her bickering Americanized sisters (Alia Shawkat and Nadine Malouf) only further weaken May’s confidence in the wisdom of matrimony.

There is a lot going on in May In The Summer, sometimes one feels, as it takes in all the cross-cultural entanglements, too much, but it is an engagingly likeable addition to the dysfunctional family sub-genre.  Most of the frustrations with the film are in its details. I was struggling to understand where the film was set and therefore the political and ideological implications which are central to the story's dynamic felt opaque - it might as well have opened with a title ‘Somewhere in the Middle East’. In addition, I wasn’t sure where the sisters, who had strong American accents, came from whilst the casting of Bill Pullman, better known for his somewhat less conventional work simply throws the film off its low-key, relatively realistic axis.  

There are other niggles: the character of May, well interpellated in her Western gender identity,  hardly seems to be one who would have authored a book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which surprisingly everyone seems to have read, and the film’s climactic revelation is awkwardly handled. But for all that, May In The Summer is a quietly charming film. Much of this is down to Ms. Dabis herself who in her debut as an actress gives a charismatic performance as the independent but vulnerable central character.  Hiam Abbass (who had been in Amreeka) is, as always, a convincing performer but all the cast are effective.

No doubt the film has an autobiographical aspect and it works best on the personal level, feeling as if it is steeped in real experience. When it tries to marry this to the broader political, religious and cultural issues involved in May’s situation it is less effective. For all that, there is enough talent here to make one hope that Ms.Dabis has more stories to tell.

Available from: Madman

 

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