A
version of this review appeared in The Age,
September 13, 2012.
Could
an age-old chick-pea recipe be the key to peace in the Middle East?
The answer is clearly “no” but that hasn't stopped
Australian documentary veteran Trevor Graham from pushing ahead with
this self-consciously quirky project – part foodie travelogue, part
plea for cross-cultural understanding. Among their other
disagreements, it seems that both Israelis and Palestinians believe
their respective ancestors invented hummus (the novelist Meir Shalev
half-jokingly cites the Old Testament in support of Israel's claim).
It's
a premise that might have inspired a three-minute segment on the ABC
youth current affairs program Hungry Beast, or on one of John
Safran's comedy shows. Like Safran, Graham works his private
life into the story – recalling how he grew up in suburbia eating
tinned spaghetti, before a Jewish girlfriend introduced him to hummus
in his teens. From then on, he tells us, he became a lifelong “hummus
tragic”. But none of this personal testimony carries much
conviction: coming from a filmmaker in his fifties, the gee-whiz tone
sounds painfully forced.
Graham
is the kind of “even-handed” observer who would seemingly rather
die than come down on one side or the other. Still, at best the film makes a
straightforwardly valid point, using hummus as a symbol of the
ancient links between many cultures in the region. At worst, the
cutesy digital graphics and folksy anecdotes seem designed to
trivialise the issues: there's only so far you can go by comparing
one of the world's most intractable conflicts to a squabble over a
dip.
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