Drama, set against the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, following two young men from either side of the war whose lives hit a complicated crossroads when they discover that they were accidentally switched at birth.
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The Prince and The Pauper gets a modern Middle Eastern political twist when a blood test reveals that Israeli and Palestinian babies were swapped at birth. Much to his amazement, wannabe musician Joseph (Jules Sitruk), is not the child of his French mother and Israeli army colonel father. Their real child is Yacine (Mehdi Dehbi), a trainee doctor, studying in France, who has been raised on the West Bank by Palestinian parents. If you can forgive the elaborate set-up, director Lorraine Levy’s film offers insight, delving into issues of identity and contentious political and religious territory, with dramatic and often moving results.
Leading by example with a cast drawn from both Israel and Palestine, this is melodrama, yes, but it largely manages to engage on a realistic emotional level due to committed and convincing acting from all. The settings and cinematography serve to contrast comfortable middle-class life in Tel Aviv with the harsh realities of the West Bank, tempering the film’s strain of gentle optimism with tragic reality.
If you can accept the tale as a simple fable of complex realities, you may well be swept up in its emotional tide. But for this reviewer, the message of brotherly love was ultimately undermined by an all too-neat ending, belying historical complexities and reeking of melodramatic manipulation. Nonetheless, as a nature or nurture allegory, The Other Son never fails to entertain the brain.
