Israel (etc.) at the PSIF

Like other forms of perversity, a film festival makes strange bedfellows. Consider the collision between the Israeli +Fill the Void and the Palestinian +When I Saw You, at the 2013 +Palm Springs International Film Festival. As it happens, both films were debuts by woman directors.  

In Fill the Void (Lemale et Ha'halal) Rama +Burshtein, a secular New Yorker who adopted Hassidism, follows a young Orthodox girl’s wavering over whether to marry her dead older sister’s husband. Her parents encourage the union to prevent their first grandson from being taken away to another marriage.
      Burshtein strains to establish the sensitivity within the rigid, patriarchal Hassidic community. The rabbis are shown to deal as firmly with the men as with the women. Both parents stress that any marriage will be only by their daughter’s choice. Still, the clear pressure for a woman to be married off is evidenced  by a young woman who’s clearly tortured by the continual blessing, “May you be the next one married.” More eloquent still is the heroine’s live-in aunt, who is without explanation armless, the ultimate emblem of a powerless, dependent woman. The film’s strong performances and emotional plotline add to the film’s force as an anthropological study of an extreme religious community. The title, incidentally, is the girl’s rationale for finally agreeing to marry her older brother-in-law, but it may also explain the development and continuation of such a firm religious structure. 

When I Saw You (Lamma Shoftak)  is set in 1967Jordan among the Palestinian refugees from the recent war. Director Annemarie +Jacir uses the sensitivity and spirit of an 11-year-old boy and his struggling mother to embody the Palestinians’ dislocation. Determined to find his father, the boy stumbles upon a refugees’ volunteer military training camp, where he’s embraced as a comrade and where he’s eventually discovered by his mother. After she fails to persuade him to return to the Harir camp, he leads her to break through the IDF patrol to return to the lights of Jerusalem. The boy can’t read but he has a remarkable skill with numbers that enables him to time their escape.

These films from opposing cultures proved surprisingly similar. The Hassidic wedding and the  Palestinian wedding looked and sounded the same. The music and the dances and the male-centeredness were the same. The Palestinian soldiers, mothers, and children looked like Israeli soldiers, mothers, and children. In both films the young leads wavered between helplessness and the hunger to mature to power. The Palestinian film’s yearning to reclaim the lights of Jerusalem recalls the Israeli films of the 50s and 60s. Both films could speak for either culture. 

Of course, one culture says Sholem aleichem and the other Salaam aleikem. Add land to that hair-breadth distinction and you get a war.
       At least these extremists are not 180 degrees apart but 360. Fundamentalists end up on the same spot. 

***

+Sharqyia is a dramatic example of what distinguishes Israel from all its Arab neighbours -- open political debate. Ami +Livne is clearly sympathetic to the hopeless situation of his Bedouin hero and critical of the Israeli government’s claim of authority over lands his family owned -- however sans deed --since the Ottoman Empire. The director has the Israel TV station refuse to air the Bedouin’s plight, but the film itself was funded in part by the Israeli film production fund, i.e., with government support. No other Middle East government would allow such dramatic, explicit criticism of its policy, leave alone help to fund it.

Kamel (Adnan Abu Wadi) is an Israeli military veteran living with his married brother in two tin-roof shacks isolated in the Negev. Livne spends slow time marking the daily ordeal of Kamel’s life, as he plods to and from the bus-stop, to and from and through the boredom of his menial job as a security guard at the central bus station, where even his colleagues’ friendliness smacks patronizing. As he lives one life in the city he is torn back to his family’s more primitive life in the desert. His brother insists Kamel go out to replenish their water supply, which makes him late for his work in town, and leads to the unresolved theft of the brothers’ tractor and tank. With his sideline in repairing abandoned TV sets and DVD players, Kamel also figures a way to play the world of media politics. By faking a bomb scare he gets himself interviewed on TV, but the station fails to report his problem so he can’t marshal public support. 

Kamel is torn between the old and modern worlds, between his family and his government, between the unwritten codes of ownership and conduct and  the harsh written strictures. Inevitably the government orders the family to leave and bulldozes their sad homes. The film is clearly on the Bedouin’s side against the government’s, but Livne doesn’t idealize the Bedouin. Kamel’s brother is unsympathetically traditionalist, refusing to let his wife study for college. He resents Kamel’s modern life, skills, work, until -- forced to rebuild anew -- he realizes they need the income. This very moving drama humanizes Israel’s complex issues over land, history and citizenship. But the press and the arts remain free.

***

How free Israeli artists can feel is represented by the postmodern exuberance of Shemi +Zarhin’s +The World is Funny (Haolam Mat'lik). The title -- and perhaps the Jew’s traditional way of life, in Israel as in the diaspora -- is a satiric troop’s catch phrase, that ends with “and so we laugh.” 

Zarhin interweaves several plots. The two remaining members of the satiric team consider a reunion performance. Three estranged siblings struggle to reconnect. Members of a writing group draw fiction from their lives and start living out  the twists in their stories. The wildly divergent tones, incidents and narrative styles here celebrate the function of storytelling, the impulses and effects of fiction. Israel, of course, is a nation and a tensions of cultures that were born out of lore, histories, stories, to an extent like none other. Despite its frothy feel, this was one of the festival’s richest, most enigmatic and carefully structured films. I itch to see it again, to really come to grips with it.

                                 ***

Then there was +Putzel (that’s yiddish for ‘little putz’ or schmuck). OK, that wasn’t an Israeli film but Jason +Chaet’s coming of age comedy about a Jewish fish deli family on the Upper West Side of NYC. I’d consider the Upper West Side part of Metro Tel Aviv, in cultural and psychological if not geographic contiguity. The defense rests.

Paradoxically, while I yearn to return to the UWS, the film’s hero Walter Himmelstein (Jack +Carpenter, a young Matthew Broderick) discovers his need to get out. Having grown up planning to take over the family fish deli, he is traumatically unable to cross out of the area, either at 116 Street or at Columbus Circle. As his marriage dissolves, his deli dream dies when his Uncle Sid (John +Pankow) plans to sell out and move to Arizona. Walter is saved by his new ardor -- reluctantly reciprocated -- for a footloose dancer, Sally (Melanie +Lynskey), who unwittingly provokes his Uncle Sid to leave his wife (Susie +Essman) for her.

The film is a coming-of-age comedy not just for Walter the putzel but for Sid the putz. Both men break out of their ill-suited lives. The two wives will test their new freedom and the free woman will test-drive relationship, so they too are making new lives for themselves. In comic variations, the Russian delivery boy tests (carnally) his love for smoked fish and the family’s oriental employee turns his fish love into a respectable dealership. In the marriage of smoked whitefish and sushi the true internationalism of Jewish culture emerges. Roe, roe, roe your boat.

This very funny film, with the vulgar energy of a Robert +Klane novel, is an astonishingly polished and sophisticated achievement that shows no evidence of only a $200,000 budget!