The West Bank-set moral fable Bethlehem opens with a ragtag group of Palestinian teenage boys playing their version of chicken. The boys have found a discarded bulletproof vest and are taking turns challenging each other to shoot the boy in the vest. The scene crackles with gallows humor, providing a dire view of kids with nothing to lose and an overwhelming need to prove manhood just out of reach. The boy with the most desperate need to prove himself, the curly-haired Sanfur (Shadi Mar'i), screams at a rival to shoot him or "I'll beat the shit out of you!"
Flash-forward and Sanfur is showing a different side of himself sitting next to a shaggy-haired, boyish-appearing adult. The man, Razi (Tsahi Halevi), could easily pass for the boy's older brother or uncle, and the affectionate, teasing banter between man and boy reinforces this impression.
"What about the jeans you promised me?"
"You don't deserve it."
"But you promised. The last ones cost 700 shekels and were ruined in the laundry."
"I'll make you pay for that."
For queer audiences, this and subsequent encounters between Razi and Sanfur could play as a grown man having an illicit sexual liaison with a barely underage youth. In other scenes, Israeli security cops will scornfully refer to Sanfur as a human "asset," a disposable figure whose life is ultimately worth little. Ironically, the boy will later plead for his handler to "take me with you to Israel."
In Bethlehem, Israeli director Yuval Adler (with Palestinian co-writer Ali Waked, who does double duty in a cameo playing a journalist) provides a frightening look at a younger generation of Palestinian youth who live in a disturbing state of limbo, assigned by a feckless older generation of guerrilla fighters to do things no one in a civilized society would ask a child to do.
The affectionate, avuncular relationship we've observed between Razi and Sanfur is not what it first appears. The man is a veteran Israeli security operative who's spent the previous two years grooming the kid, Sanfur, for the dangerous role of being an informant on his own people. And it gets worse. Not only is Sanfur feeding Razi information about the movement of the area's "freedom fighters," but Sanfur's older brother Ibrahim is the area's leading terrorist, the televised face of terror. When an Israeli Jerusalem neighborhood is struck by a suicide bomber, it's Ibrahim who delivers the bad tidings, to a chorus of sirens.
This is the rare action thriller that is also character-driven. The filmmakers make strategic use of big speeches to show us the many conflicting motivations pushing each of the major characters to his possible doom. The film's most tender moment unfolds in an Israeli emergency ward, where Sanfur has been taken after one of his stunts with a bulletproof vest goes awry. His Jewish doctor speaks to a worried Razi, who hovers at the wounded kid's bedside.
"We took some shrapnel out of his stomach."
"What happened to you? You did that stunt with Jamal? Why do you do shit like that?"
"No reason."
"You could have been killed. Who lets himself get shot? Why didn't you call me?"
"I knew exactly what you would have said. You're not going, right?"
"I'm not leaving."
"Stay here. Don't leave me. I don't want my father to see me injured."
"I won't leave until we figure it out."
Bethlehem keeps you guessing whether an Israeli cop can really raise a confused Palestinian boy whose own people push him to be a martyr, without both becoming collateral damage. The filmmakers are adept at showing the bewildering variety of factions and forces that push in on every human living dangerously in what American Christians persist on calling the Holy Land.