The Syrian Bride

The Syrian Bride Review 

2004 ‧ Drama/Political drama ‧ 1h 37m

IMDB 7.4/10             Rotten Tomatoes 88%            Roger Ebert 3/5

My Rating ★★ 

The Syrian Bride (directed by Eran Riklis) is a drama about the plights of a family navigating bureaucratic troubles in order to marry their daughter Mona to a television comedian Tallel from Syria. In order to marry him she will not be able to return to her homeland of Israel and is very troubled by the thought of leaving her family behind. There are a lot of other subplots within the family members like Tallel's brother who married a Russian woman and because of this he is not on good terms with his family and also the story of the sister of the bride and how she wants to go back to school but her husband won't let her. These side plots are a bit confusing and don't really add much at all to the main story as they intertwine together with the wide cast of characters. If the viewer doesn't really have a lot of background into Israeli/Syrian tensions and politics then understanding the main conflict of the story is quite difficult unfortunately. There doesn't appear to be much to the story other than the main conflict really and other assorted tensions between the side characters. This made the subplots seem like unnecessary filler to the main conflict in the story.

The majority of the characters didn't stand out too much to me but one that was pretty humorous and caught my attention whenever he was on was the wedding photographer who was just trying his best to take an enjoyable wedding video for the couple but instead captured a rather depressing mess as the family scrambles to get the bride a marriage license. One strange detail that seems a bit out of place is whenever the photographer is showing the video through his perspective the film is suddenly in black and white? I understand the idea behind it but the sudden switches from color to black and white felt a bit jarring and out of place since it only happens maybe 2-3 times in the whole film. The cinematography was quite nice in some scenes but otherwise not really very visually appealing from a cinematography standpoint.

In my opinion this film just didn't catch my attention very well and instead of telling a story that I felt I was able to follow I was left with plenty of questions and potential plot holes that went unexplained. As a disclaimer this could definitely simply be due to the fact that I didn't understand the politics the film was trying to explore and being from a Western audience it is harder to understand the hardships of traveling between Israel and Syria. However, a plot hole that Roger Ebert pointed out in his review of this film gave some interesting insight into why the audience might not feel a lot of emotional weight in the bride not being able to see her family again. "There is a note of gloom in the opening scenes of "The Syrian Bride," because after Mona crosses into Syria, she can never return to Israel, and 'will never see her family again.' True, she will never see them again by crossing into Israel, but there are such things as airplane flights from both Syria and Israel to perfectly pleasant destinations that will welcome them both, and since the soap opera star can presumably afford the tickets, I was not in tears." This is a great quote to end my review on since the biggest reason I found myself not very invested in this film is simply because it really just didn't feel like it had much of an emotional backbone or any weight to the situation due to several different reasons.