God's Stories #2: Noah

Materialism, religious tourism, and family politics abound in this Arabic take on the events leading up to the Flood.

Another Friday, another look at ‘God’s Stories’, the series of Arabic Bible movies produced by Jerusalem-born, Bulgaria-based filmmaker Robert Savo.

Last week, I wrote up my thoughts in a regular review-ish sort of format. This week, I’m going point-form, as it’s the easiest way to get my thoughts out.

Here goes:

• The Sin—which told the story of Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel—was presumably fairly easy to do on a low budget. Because those characters were the first humans who ever lived, there was no larger civilization that had to be depicted, no city or town or palace or whatever. Noah, on the other hand, is a story about the destruction of the world and the construction of a giant boat containing every kind of animal—and the budget limitations definitely show here. That’s not necessarily a problem, but the animals are essentially reduced to a few CGI critters walking onto a CGI Ark, plus a few sound effects that pipe in from the background during the scenes on the Ark. And the water that splashes on certain people when the Flood begins is… not as voluminous as you’d expect. So there’s a lot more riding on the drama, which is actually fairly small-scale.

• Longtime readers will know that I’m a big fan of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which really went for the more mythological aspects of the Noah story, not least by emphasizing that the Flood wasn’t just a year or so of Really Bad Weather but was actually the undoing of Creation; it was a return to the chaos that existed before God put the firmament in place that separated the waters above from the waters below. Needless to say, most films about Noah haven’t approached the story from quite such a cosmic perspective, and have tended to be a bit more mundane—and so it is here. There are no angels or demigods here, just Noah and his family dealing with annoying neighbours.

• In fairness, the characters do talk about bigger problems in the outside world. But that’s just it: they talk about it. We hear that there is violence and lust in the world, and that attacks are increasing at night. And we hear that people are harming both humans and animals just for fun. But we don’t actually see or experience these things, so they remain a bit of an abstraction.

• What we do see is more relatable, for lack of a better word: commerce, corrupt business practices, cultic behaviour, etc. Noah spends so many years building the Ark that it becomes a sort of tourist attraction, and Noah is okay with people coming to gawk at his work because it’s one way to ensure that his call to repentance will be heard by the entire world before the Flood comes—but then some of the visitors start setting up their own religious cults, worshipping not the God who commissioned the Ark but gods of their own making and possibly the Ark itself, while Noah’s neighbours sell these people cheap mementoes and watered-down wine. It might seem odd that the film spends so much time on this stuff, rather than the sensationalist vices that prompt the Flood in other films, but if you’ve ever been to the Middle East, you might have a sense of where this critique of religious tourism is coming from.

• A major recurring theme in this movie is Noah’s friendship with his neighbour Fassam. Maybe “friendship” is too positive a word, as Fassam is one of those neighbours who teases Noah and profits off of Noah’s fame—though he’s a lot less mean about it than some. Fassam is also drunk all the time, and doesn’t believe in any of the gods. But he lets his daughter marry one of Noah’s sons, and he’s clearly haunted to some degree by the reality that Noah represents; he asks if Noah would let him on the Ark, and you get the sense that Noah would like him to be on the Ark, if only Fassam would repent. As it is, Fassam dies before the Flood comes, and Noah seems relieved that neither he nor Fassam will ever have to know if Fassam would have been turned away.

• Incidentally, just to underline one point above: Fassam, Noah’s neighbour, is constantly drunk—but at no point does this movie ever allude to the fact that the first person to get drunk in the Bible was Noah himself, after the Flood! This fact about Noah was key to Aronofsky’s film (years before he made it, he cited Noah’s drunkenness as indicative of the character’s “survivor’s guilt”), and it has been alluded to in other films such as The Green Pastures. So it’s not exactly an obscure point. But this film leaves that detail out, and leaves Noah looking quite a bit purer, or holier, than he does in the Bible.

• If the film avoids foreshadowing Noah’s failings after the Flood, it definitely foreshadows the failings of his middle son, Ham. Ham and his wife are defined throughout the film by their materialism: they protest when Noah says they can’t take any luxuries onto the Ark, only necessities like seeds for planting, and Ham partners with Fassam and a shadier figure named Binti to get rich off the tourists, both before and after Noah’s family gets on the Ark. (When the family, including Ham and his wife, get on board, Binti starts taking bets as to how long they’ll stay in there with the stinky animals, and Ham is supposed to get half the profits.) When the Flood does come and go, Ham delights in the realization that “all the gold, silver, and spices belong to me now. Everything is ours!” (Japheth replies, “What good is it? There are no buyers or sellers left.”)

• Tensions also simmer between Ham’s wife and the other women of the family. Ham’s wife scratches another wife’s face during an argument in one of the early scenes, and eventually one of the wives laments that they won’t make it out of the Ark alive if they all have to stay on it together for a long time.

• Incidentally, the sons’ wives are all named after Mesopotamian goddesses: Shem’s wife is Ishtar, Ham’s wife is Tiamet, and Japheth’s wife is Ki. (Perhaps not surprisingly, Ham’s wife is named after the goddess of chaos.) Presumably these names are a nod to the theory that the biblical story was influenced by Mesopotamian flood myths like the ones in Atrahasis and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

• Some of the messaging is a bit on-the-nose. It’s one thing for Noah to say that the people who built the nearby temples “aren’t really searching for God” because “they bow down in their temple to a god they created, one they can kick if he doesn’t do what they tell him. They worship themselves.” But it’s quite another for Binti to openly declare that he worships himself, and that he does so because he’s become the boss of every god he ever worshipped.

• There are some interesting nods to Noah’s ancestors. He says he misses his great-grandfather Enoch, who used to spend entire days just contemplating the beauty of individual flowers, clouds, and animals. I don’t believe we ever see Noah’s father Lamech or grandfather Methuselah, but we are told at the beginning of the film that they are still alive—and then, about halfway through the film, we witness Methuselah’s funeral and we are told that he is being buried next to Lamech. Sure enough, if you add up the numbers, the Bible tells us that Lamech died about five years before Methuselah, while Methuselah died the same year the Flood took place (cf Genesis 5:25-31; 7:6, 11).

• Noah declares that Methuselah, by living so long, was holding back God’s hand of judgment: “Now that this witness is gone, we shall be gone, too.” Rashi, an 11th-century rabbi, said God delayed the Flood until seven days after Methuselah’s death, to allow for a time of mourning, while the Book of Jasher, published in 1613, says Methuselah died before the Flood came because God did not want him to see his neighbours die in the catastrophe.

• It’s fun to see Noah’s family concern itself with some of the more mundane aspects of living on the Ark. One of the wives asks, “Are there going to be ovens on this wooden fish?” One of his sons replies that, with all the water that Noah has been predicting, fire shouldn’t be a problem. Also, when a fire breaks out near the Ark—the work of arsonists, perhaps?—Noah says the family will need to dig a trench around the Ark and fill it with water, to keep it safe.

• Noah delivers much of his dialogue while staring up at the sky, even when he is supposed to be talking to members of his own family. He is particularly prone to doing this while talking about God. It’s been a while since I watched any Middle Eastern “Bible movies”—most of which are Muslim and are thus based on the Koran and other Islamic sources, not the Bible per se—but the performance here is reminiscent of how the prophets tend to be depicted in those films.

• There isn’t a whole lot about this film that stood out to me visually, but I really liked the bit inside the Ark when Ham walks aboard, and as he stands there and talks to his family—all of them visible in a fairly wide shot—the door simply closes behind them, and their voices keep echoing in the chamber. Genesis 7:16 says God “shut them in”, the implication being that Noah and his family did not close the door themselves, and this shot conveys that idea quite nicely.

• Amusingly, later on Ham wants to step onto the roof of the Ark and look around, and Noah says there’s no rule stopping them from opening the hatch—but if Ham falls outside, they can’t open the door to let him in again!

• As with The Sin, so here: Noah sometimes rushes through some of the biblical plot points—it goes from first raindrop to ocean-covered Earth very quickly—and it sometimes relies on narration to zip through those points. But the narrator does make at least one comment that feels almost like a humorous comment on the text: after noting that Noah and his family were on the Ark for one year and seventeen days (cf Genesis 7:10-11, 8:13-14), he adds, “How they managed with all those animals is a mystery that only God knows.”

• Interestingly, at the end of the film, as Noah offers his sacrifice and thanks God for saving his family, the camera pans across their faces, and the shot ends on Ham and Tiamet before the film cuts back to Noah’s face, looking up as usual. Did I imagine it, or is there a slightly ominous tone to that ending? Does the continued presence of Ham and Tiamet spell trouble for the future?

And that’s that. Next up: a much, much longer film about Abraham.

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I’ve written a lot about Noah movies in the past. I wrote an article on the genre (now behind a paywall) for Christianity Today back in 2014. And I wrote a gazillion blog posts about Darren Aronofsky’s film going all the way back to November 2006, when he said he was working on a biblical epic but he wouldn’t say what it was.

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Bits of Robert Savo’s Noah appear in this super-trailer for the ‘God’s Stories’ series:

Noah also has its own dedicated trailer: