Miral

Directed by Julian Schnabel. Starring Hiam Abbass, Freida Pinto, Yasmine Al Massri, Ruba Blal, Alexander Siddig, Willem Dafoe, Vanessa Redgrave 15A cert, Cineworld/Light House/ Screen, Dublin, 112 min

FOLLOWING the spectacular critical (and, for a foreign-language film, commercial) success of The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, Julian Schnabel must be reeling from the snorts that have been directed at his well-meaning, humane follow-up.

Tackling aspects (too many aspects, perhaps) of the postwar Palestinian experience, Miralis certainly compromised on several levels. The dialogue features a few too many unsubtle pleas for tolerance. The expository tone will patronise any viewer who's read a newspaper over the past 40 years.

Most troubling of all, the casting verges on the insulting. Freida Pinto, an Indian, playing a Palestinian? Well, I suppose all foreigners do look alike.

That noted, Miraldoes work quite effectively as a liberal soap opera. Taken from Rula Jebreal's own semi-autobiographical novel, the picture begins with a story set shortly after the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. Hiam Abbass, one our era's most undervalued actors, plays a stubborn women who, struck by the growing sense of menace, sets up an orphanage for Palestinian girls.

We then zip forward to the 1960s and consider the tale of Nadia (Yasmine Al Massri), who, after being arrested for punching a Jewish citizen on a bus, ends up making the acquaintance of a nurse in detention on terrorist charges.

Eventually, after another pair of temporal shifts, we find ourselves watching the story of Nadia’s daughter, Miral (Pinto). While working at a refugee camp, the titular heroine gathers an understanding about her own people’s suffering.

As in The Diving Bell an the Butterfly, Schnabel shows a willingness to experiment with grammar: the camera is often handheld; jump cuts punctuate the action. But the political rhetoric and sociological analysis remain surprisingly unsophisticated.

Never mind. If you can make yourself believe you're watching a decent, old-fashioned liberal drama from the 1970s or 1960s (something by Otto Preminger or Robert Redford, say), then Miralshould be pretty diverting. The performances are consistently solid, and the passion of Schnabel's convictions show through in every scene.

Sure, it's no Diving Bell. But it's asking a lot of any film to live up to that standard.