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This Son Shines

A short synopsis of "The Other Son" might be "Israeli baby mistakenly given by hospital to Palestinian parents and vice versa". That was all I knew going in and it sounded so incredibly preachy that the best I could hope for was that it would not be overly long and excruciating. Tales of a similar nature have been told ad nauseum and I had to wonder what writer/director Lorraine Lévy could add to the discussion. Incredibly, it turned out to be beautifully done and I could not imagine a more realistic representation of a situation such as this.

Joseph Silberg (Jules Sitruk) is an eighteen-year-old young man who wants to be a musician, but he is slated to join the Israeli military. Alon (Pascal Elbé), his father, is a career military man. Confusion sets in when Joseph's mother, Orith (Emmanuelle Devos), learns that her son's blood type does not match hers or her husband's. When Alon finds out, his initial reaction is to suspect that his wife had an affair, a reasonable assumption, but the truth is even more hard to accept. After Joseph was born, the hospital came under attack from Scud missiles and everyone was evacuated. In the confusion, the Silberg son is brought to a Palestinian family and the Silbergs received the Palestinian family's son.

Yacine Al Bezaaz (Mehdi Dehbi), the Palestinian counterpart to Joseph, has just returned from France where he is studying to be a doctor. He walks into the storm that engulfs both families. His father, Saïd (Khalifa Natour), and mother, Leïla (Areen Omari), meet with the Silbergs and everyone's fears are confirmed. This is precisely the moment where everything could have derailed, but Lévy does a masterful job of not just keeping it on the rails. She makes it hum.

The rest of "The Other Son" is an examination of human relationships between different cultures, different genders, different religions, and what it means to be who you are and what it is that really defines you. While at times it borders on tempers boiling over, as one might expect, Lévy instead keeps everyone at levels of behavior that can alternate from seething to deep self-reflection. By attacking it in this manner she leaves us with a great appreciation of the art of filmmaking and what people are capable of under very trying conditions. See it instead of the any other one you might be considering.