AN ARTISTIC, KEATON-ESQUE TAKE ON PALESTINIAN PLIGHT.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

THE POKER-FACED Palestinian comedy ``Divine Intervention'' attempts a difficult balancing act between observation, anger and arty influences. Writer-director-star Elia Suleiman can't always prevent these ambitious, contradictory elements from crashing - or his own withholding tendency to sometimes be a crashing bore.

But when the movie is working, it's very interesting, informatively funny and, depending on the passion of your political sympathies, enraging or invigorating. At the very least, ``Intervention'' presents, in its collagelike way, a sad socio-psychological study of a people whose hatred for a mutual enemy is turning in against themselves and eroding whatever is left of civil behavior a little bit more each day.

Favoring long, carefully composed static shots (not for nothing has Suleiman cited France's latter-day slapstick genius Jacques Tati and Italian ennui expert Michelangelo Antonioni as his main influences), the filmmaker has, to some degree, made two different movies here. The first part presents us with a series of loosely connected vignettes of Arab life in Nazareth, Ramallah and other parts of the West Bank.

These include everything from mean-looking youths chasing a guy in a Santa Claus suit (whom we later learn has a knife in his chest) to neighbors making some kind of inscrutable point out of tossing their garbage into each others' yards. The cumulative message of these and many other occasionally frustrating confrontations is clearly that the Palestinians are destroying themselves in any number of large and small ways.

But as the second part of the film settles into focus, animus is just as evidently shifted toward Israel. A bit of a narrative through line as well as fantastic flights of power fantasy take hold as E.S. - the character, who happens to be a film director, played by director Suleiman - enters the picture (which he does, rather spectacularly, by blowing up an Israeli tank with a discarded apricot pit).

His father, one of the angry Palestinians we've previously met, is hospitalized in the West Bank. E.S., who lives in Jerusalem, has to pass an infamous roadside checkpoint in order to visit him. Then there is The Woman (Manal Khader), whom the press kit tells us is E.S.'s Ramallah-dwelling girlfriend. We would not otherwise know this, as neither he nor she speaks a word in the entire film. What they do do is meet in a vast parking lot overlooking the checkpoint and hold hands for hours on end as they watch Israeli guards harass Arab motorists.

To break this monotony (to varying degrees of cinematic success), E.S. lets his imagination take over. He inflates a balloon with Yassir Arafat's picture on it, and it flies over barricades to the center of Jerusalem. He dreams of his girlfriend sensually strutting past a guard tower, which collapses from the sight of her. Later, in the film's most inflammatory sequence, she morphs into a superpowered ninja babe and magically turns the bullets of an Israeli target practice squad back on the shooters.

Obviously, Suleiman is a big fan of symbolism, both loony and lame (to sum things up, he gives us a shot of a trembling pressure cooker). His sense of absurdity is better honed. The gag about the lost French tourist is priceless. And of the film's many wordless sequences, the one in which patients and caregivers at a Palestinian hospital crowd a hallway for a mass cigarette break says volumes about the film's main theme of self- defeatism.

And Suleiman uses his own basset-eyed, immobilized face to represent the Palestinian perplexity over what courses of action to take. It's not the most enthralling visage in cinema history - indeed, another obvious influence, Buster Keaton, expressed a lot more while deceiving audiences that he was mugging as little. But Keaton was not searching for his voice, or one for his people, to the desperate extent that Suleiman is, either. When the director of ``Divine Intervention'' finally figures out how to speak to us, it's a good bet that we'll have to listen.

DIVINE INTERVENTION - Two and one half stars

(Not rated: violence, language)

Starring: Elia Suleiman, Manal Khader, Nayef Fahoum Daher.

Director: Elia Suleiman.

Running time: 1 hr. 29 min.

Playing: Laemmle Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills; Edwards University Town Center 6, Irvine.

In a nutshell: Kaleidoscopic, often dialogue-free Palestinian black comedy/fantasy about occupation's effect on West Bank Arabs. Some trenchant observations, acute satire and self-criticism balance strong anti-Israeli sentiment, lame jokes and long, tedious stretches.

CAPTION(S):

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Photo:

Elia Sulieman - writer, director and star of ``Divine Intervention'' - prepares to float Yassir Arafat over Jerusalem.