On DVD: "Ajami"

Watching Ajami, the notable new bulletin from the frontline of the Arab-Israeli conflict, one is reminded of the informed resignation of The West Wing's Toby Ziegler, faced with another breakdown in the peace negotiations: "It's tribal. It's Hatfield and McCoy. It'll never end." This collaboration between two young filmmakers, one Israeli, one Palestinian, nevertheless breaks new ground by addressing the economics of the conflict. It opens with a retribution killing that turns out to be a tragic case of mistaken identity. When the intended target, the 19-year-old nephew of a bar owner who refused to pay protection money to an Arab crime syndicate, goes to try and broker peace with the killers, a court of the community's elders rules the teenager, too, must pay a form of protection to spare both his and his younger brother's lives. The young man's big idea is to start selling drugs to meet these payments.

On the other side of town, meanwhile, a wearied detective laments the manner in which an entire neighborhood will take to the streets to defend one of their own, no matter that the person being defended is himself peddling drugs on his defenders' own doorsteps. It's tribal, all right, and we should credit Ajami for raising, for perhaps the first time in a cinema, the notion that peace in the Middle East may just not be an economically viable business model for some; that - in a region with a long-standing tradition of trading - there are certain individuals making a lot of money out of prolonging this conflict.

The irony is that the film unfolds not within the Occupied Territories, but instead around the relatively cosmopolitan outpost of Jaffa, south of Tel Aviv: a city where Arabs, Israelis and Christians exist side-by-side, sometimes occupying the same bed, and conversations flip freely between Hebrew and Arabic, most of the locals able to understand a little of both. Few of the film's characters seem actively religious, when it comes to it: they have businesses to run, parties to throw, bongs to smoke. The directors, Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, don't easily differentiate between one set of residents and another; truth is, it's hard enough to tell who's who, let alone who's in the right, once they've started brawling in the road.

Thrown into the very thick of these niggles and conflicts - always a bold move on a filmmaker's part, and here a sign of justifiable confidence - the viewer, for their part, is left, like the peacemakers of this world, trying to make sense of this situation as best they can: a greatly less simplistic experience than one might have expected going in, it's a film - and a narrative puzzle - that will reward second and third viewings on DVD, as we try to pinpoint where exactly we are in the timeframe, and what characters who have momentarily disappeared offscreen might be up to. (The film provokes suspicion and fear, which may be the dominant modes of response in the Middle East at the present moment.)

Ajami reportedly started life as a conventional crime drama before being radically restructured by the two directors: while elements of a linear narrative remain, the film's five chapters shuffle back and forth, framed by one of the community's younger residents striving to compose a comic strip out of the events we've witnessed. This enterprise - turning tragic realities into art - will itself come to an abrupt halt; the conflict, we soon gather, is strong enough to resist all framing. What this gives the film is a greater multiplicity of perspectives: licence to double back or jolt forwards, dodge the cliched, even appear to contradict itself in places.

The result really does contain multitudes; for all the bloodshed and suffering it shines a light on, it feels very nearly as alive, as electric, as Amores Perros, the last great city movie of this decade. Copti and Shani have a particular feel for nights shading into days without anything constructive having been resolved - indeed, with worse still lying in wait for its characters over the horizon: young children toting guns, drug overdoses, a neighbourly noise complaint that resolves itself in a vicious, unmotivated stabbing. The abiding image is of one endless street scuffle, where bodies wrestle in the gutter, aggravation piles atop aggravation, and the situation spirals rapidly out of control; where even the peacemakers, those trying to pull the troublemakers apart, begin to dissolve into a blur of bruised and bloodied limbs. In the Jaffa of Ajami, even those trying to do the right thing are fated to be dragged into the carnage: the violence may stop, but the processes behind the violence never end.

Ajami is available on DVD from Monday.