The Green Prince
Directed by Nadav Schirman
Man on Wire, James Marsh's riveting 2008 documentary, made sublime use of reenactments to recount Philippe Petit's 1968 death-defying tightrope walk between Manhattan's Twin Towers. Furthermore, such recreations – and their inherent subjectivity – proved ideal for a man revelling in his own lore.
When the same techniques are applied to the harrowing tale of Mosab Hassan Yousef, the son of a Hamas founder who collaborated with Israel's Shin Bet for a decade, the effect is markedly different. There's the distinct sense that director Nadav Schirman felt compelled to dramatize portions of Mosab's story lest the audience's attention wane but never determined an artful manner in which to do so. Given that he also lacks Marsh's visual composition skills, the staged sequences feel like little more than added-production-value-by-numbers.
Fortunately, there's nothing standard about the serpentine path that took Mosab from devoted Palestinian combatant to political refugee seeking asylum in the US (while converting to Christianity in the process). Forced to make impossible decisions at practically every turn, Mosab's clandestine life was shaped by limited options and governed by macabre logic that frequently left the truth sounding ridiculous to those he deigned to share it with.
Mosab and his Shin Bet “handler” Gonen Ben Yitzhak are the only two talking head here, making their account of events definitive for the film's purposes. And yet, Schirman still seems eager to have Mosab convince us of the validity of his claims, asking him to unnecessarily restate the peril he courted daily. These wide-eyed declarations ultimately pale in comparison to his more muted recollections of almost inconceivable acts of betrayal. It's these haunted, unadorned admissions that deliver the film's purest drama and ultimately redeem it.
