Isaac and Ishmael

Le Fils d'autre (The other son)

Crit

I had no idea this would be such a perfect yuletide film: a Semitic boychild (actually, two here) born in fractious circumstances (during the Scud-dodging Tel Aviv January of Bush I's Gulf War) ushering in peace, love, and understanding.

The premise here is a cheesy relic of 18th-century novels--babies switched at birth--but in the context of an Israeli and a Palestinian family, the goofiness of the premise is trumped by questions of what constitutes family, what constitutes motherhood, what constitutes Jewishness, what basis is demanded for class hatred. It's a beautiful, wrenching tale, and if one might fairly complain that the working out of the complexities is an unrealistically simple conclusion, that one won't be me.