MARTYR: Mazen Khaled's fantasia of love, death, grief--and imprisoning religion/tradition

It is difficult to imagine, after viewing MARTYR -- the new movie from Lebanese filmmaker Mazen Khaled -- that the film was not hugely divisive, both in its home country of Lebanon and elsewhere. This is one of the most homoerotic movies I have ever seen, while remaining just this side of anything obviously/overtly homosexual. There are good reasons for this particular artistic stance. Writer/ director Khaled (shown below) is exploring a Muslim society in which the

highly religious adhere to a strict code that, by not allowing nearly as much interplay between male and female as does most of western society, pushes young men together into kinds of "closeness" that cannot help but move from mental, physical and spiritual into the sexual, especially when some of these men are, of course, already genetically programmed to want and need the kind of love from each other that can best be expressed sexually.

Further, while fostering homoeroticism, the restrictive nature of the Muslim religion allows for less privacy. The movie's "hero," Hassane (played with fraught intensity by a beautiful newcomer, Hamza Mekdad, below, being carried), can't even masturbate in peace while taking a shower -- thanks to his parents' constant badgering.

Khaled's film is a fantasia of visuals and themes -- imagined and real, on land and sea, impressionistic, grounded, emotional, some of these even danced and sung -- about attraction, love, employment, economics, death and grief, all sifted through the sieve of the kind of fundamentalist religion that controls all.

The bare bones of the story could hardly be simpler: a day in the life of Hassane, his family and friends. Yet within all this resides every major emotion and event you could ask for (except perhaps some humor). The movie is elliptical, however; don't expect to have everything explained in typically expository fashion.

Instead of looking for work (or simply showing up at the jobs some of them already have), Hassane and his pals take a day off at the beach, above, where the popular sport is to take a somewhat dangerous dive or jump (below) from a favored point above the water.  One particular dive changes everything, and from there the movie fills with questioning and grief, as the group begins to pine for what might have been.

Characters explore the thoughts and feelings they are unable or unwilling to vent in their actual life -- via dance (below, in the closest thing to something homosexual the movie offers) and choral keening (from Hassane's mother and her peers), even as the movie continues its immense and near-constant fascination with the human body, skin and touch.

Moving from documentary-like footage to philosophical inquiry to religious ritual to the question of what the title term actually means, Martyr balances the formal with the elliptical, finally arriving full circle back to the sea -- and the skin.

Don't expect something at all standard here, but if you approach the film in anything like the spirit in which it was conceived and executed, I think you will find yourself enmeshed and enraptured by its beauty, while saddened at the picture of male youth wasted and/or sacrificed to tradition and religion.

From Breaking Glass Pictures and running 84 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, November 30 in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Glendale and then on Friday, December 14 in New York City at the Cinema Village. In between times, on Tuesday, December 4, Martyr will have its release on DVD and VOD (the latter via iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, Vudu and FandangoNOW).

Ziad Doueiri's THE INSULT opens, shortlisted for this year's Best Foreign Language Film

When Ziad Doueiri's The Attack hit theaters back in 2013, TrustMovies was impressed with everything about that film, from its concept and complexity to its execution and disquieting semi-resolution. Now comes this Lebanese filmmaker's latest and, if possible, even more impressive work, THE INSULT, which has already been shortlisted for this year's Oscar as Best Foreign Language Film. Along with The Square it is up there with the best I've seen for this past year. And it is also perhaps the most important.

What Mr. Doueiri, who directed and co-wrote (along with Joelle Touma) has to say goes to the heart of so much that is going on throughout our world today. Instead of moralizing, this supremely talented and generous filmmaker concocts an incident that sets individuals, a community and finally a small country on their ear and in the process explores the situation from angle after angle until we understand more than we ever imagined we might about the participants. (And they, praise be, have begun to better understand, in maybe the smallest of increments, each other and themselves.)

The Attack was set mostly in Israel and put us into the experience of a highly successful Arab-Israeli doctor who suddenly learns that his wife has killed herself, along with a number of others, in a suicide bombing. How he and his Israeli friends and co-workers respond to this is as complicated and often unnerving as you might guess.

Now, in The Insult, Doueiri returns to Lebanon and pits a Lebanese Christian (Adel Karam, above, left) against a Muslim Palestinian (Kamel El Basha, above, right) who, along with his wife, has taken refuge (as have so many other Palestinians) in Lebanon. The filmmaker's canvas opens up to explore Lebanese society and culture in ways and from angles that I doubt most of us have come anywhere close to previously seeing. It is eye-opening, to say the least.

The workplace, the justice system, family matters, history and much more is given us in a tightly-woven plot that avoids melodrama but manages to stay sharp and on course throughout. Most wonderfully, there are no villains here. Oh, you may imagine there are and perhaps feel quite some hatred for certain of the characters. But wait.

The great blessing Doueiri bestows upon us is to allow us to finally understand what his characters have experienced, while allowing them to do this, too. Don't worry. There are no huge "breakthroughs" or eureka! moments here. Yet the filmmaker's steady accretion of small, incremental information builds beautifully and believably to completion.

How Israel -- so often the main agenda but here seen sidelong -- plays into all of this is particularly unusual and gratifying. Like so much else that Doueiri manages, Israel, too, becomes something we must view in a different light.

I am obviously leaving out almost all reference to plot here because the manner in which the filmmaker gives this to us is simply too good -- too nuanced and surprising -- to ruin for you. Do yourself a favor and go see The Insult as soon as you're able -- and before you've read much more about it.

From Cohen Media Group, the movie -- in Arabic with English subtitles and running 112 minutes -- opens this Friday, January 12, in New York City at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema and The Quad, and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal. Elsewhere? Hope so, but I can't find any further playdates on the Cohen web site for the film.