What a fascinating cultural artifact. A story about Zionism and the Palestinian cause written originally by an Englishman and then directed by a Korean—and Park Chan-Wook in particular, whose film The Handmaiden pointedly attacks the Japanese colonization of Korea. A film whose leading Israelis are played by men who aren't even Jewish. A show released just a few years before Israel began a wholesale campaign of genocide that caused the biggest wave of western anti-Zionism in history.
In that context, just hard to read this as anything but a multilayered tragedy. There is Charlie's tragedy, of course, trapped between two loyalties and unsure how to do the right thing in an impossible scenario. It takes great pains as well to show the tragedy (and the hope!) of the Palestinians—the scene with the girl on the cliff will be with me forever. And then there's the tragedy of Gadi, a young man raised in a world that held its own justice unquestionable and who learned too late how to question.
It's harrowing, and it's beautiful. The direction is excellent—the camera adores architecture while also holding it emblematic of power, from the construction of a room specifically to contain Salim to the penultimate scene giving us our only glimpse of Israel itself as a place full of the same brutalist buildings we've seen repeatedly in England and Germany. I look forward to watching this again someday, once my heart has recovered.