MOVIE REVIEW
“May in the Summer”
Grade: C+
Starring Cherien Dabis, Hiam Abbass, Alia Shawkat, Nadine Malouf and Bill Pullman. Directed by Cherien Dabis.
Rated R for some language. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 39 minutes.
Bottom line: A familiar story, just set in a different environment
By Roger Moore
McClatchy-Tribune
The religious and cultural fault lines of the Middle East get thoroughly blurred in “May in the Summer,” the second feature film from the Palestinian-American actress-writer-director Cherien Dabis (“Amreeka”).
The setting and various religious rifts are unfamiliar, if the domestic/romantic melodrama isn’t.
May and her sisters rendezvous at the airport, three expats returned to the desert land of their birth. The absence of soldiers and Orthodox Jews tells you this isn’t Israel. It’s Amman, Jordan.
May (Dabis), a vivacious Palestinian New Yorker, is returning to marry her Islamic scholar fiance. The bubbly, big-mouthed party girl Yasmine (Nadine Malouf) and marriage-averse tomboy Dalia (Alia Shawkat, “Arrested Development”) have taken a month off to fly here and help her prepare, because Mom (Hiam Abbass, “The Visitor”) does not approve.
Jordan is home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the Middle East, and present-day Mom is a born-again Christian. She is vehemently opposed to this marriage.
May is worried about the wedding, having argued with her intended before getting on the plane. She’s troubled by her mother, refuses to see her father, and everywhere around her she’s reminded of the reasons she’s glad she left. Jogging, she earns the leering attention of every creep within eyeshot.
And every so often, military jets interrupt a conversation, reminding one of the tensions of the region.
Dabis, a striking woman with a seriously sexy screen presence, is our tour guide through a land of stark desert mountainscapes, Dead Sea resorts and nightclubs.
But the behind-the-camera Dabis never lets us forget the “otherness” of it all. The sisters giggle at Muslim women encased in their black Hijab head-coverings.
The tone is light and comic, even when things take more melodramatic turns in the third act (Bill Pullman is her estranged dad).
Dabis requires an awful lot from the audience, perhaps too much. One of the running gags here is how confusing it can be for outsiders to see why the region is in turmoil. Three lovely and distinctly Semitic women kvetching about finding themselves, finding the right man, bickering over “our petty problems … DJ or band?” Switch the language from Arabic to Hebrew and this is an Israeli culture clash comedy, or Jewish American variation on a “Bridesmaids” theme.
“May in the Summer” doesn’t have the heart of “Amreeka,” which plopped Palestinians in small-town Middle America. But Dabis takes these archetypal characters and finds just enough funny, fish-out-of-water things for them to do in this unusual setting, even if she’s determined not to spell out exactly where that setting is and what its religious history might be.
