Having examined Alice Goodman’s controversial libretto for the opera of the 1985 Achille Lauro highjacking (see my Oct 24/14 blog) we now turn to Penny Woolcock’s inventive film adaptation of the opera. From the title onward -- the crippled American Jew didn't just die; he was murdered -- I found the libretto biased against the Jews and whitewashing the terrorists. Woolcock makes enough attempts at balance that the Palestinian Film Festival rejected the film for being pro-Israel. Of course, it’s not that simple.
For openers, Woolcock made three strategic innovations. First, she eschewed a theatre stage for the physically real world, the landscape, crowded dusty village streets, the ship in dock and at sea. Though initially the real backdrop jars against the artifice of the singing the clever staging and editing ease our way. Some lines are spoken, not sung, in keeping with the extra naturalism. That choice enforces the historic setting of the action and grounds the characters’ emotions in the real world. Second, she leaps back and forward in time. The 1985 hijack is intercut with Israel events of 1948, 2001 and 2003. This serves this story because in the Palestinian-Israeli war the past and the present are inseparable. Each side’s current action radically derives from its sense of historic injustice -- and, alas, feeds into the next. Third, as Woolcock emphasizes the realism and the historic context she drops the libretto’s choruses of the sea and the desert.
Woolcock strips away the heroism of Goodman’s terrorists. A pre-title sequence shows the beaten quartet arrested, defeated, woebegone, confronted by the widowed Mrs. Klinghoffer. She spits in one man's face, to the cocky Rambo’s amusement. In the epilogue the four “heroes” are again diminished. Leader Molqi has grown into a pampered big shot, chauffeured into the village in a Mercedes limo The idealistic Mamoud is a broken man, led away from a chance encounter with his damaged old girlfriend. His friend Omar has an arm in a sling, another emblem of reduction. This inflection may have disturbed Palestinian audiences because those terrorists — like their descendants — are national heroes. They are martyrs, with streets named after them and handsome pensions and rewards paid their families (which is one reason the Israelis often destroy their family homes). Here they're last seen mainly as losers.
The narrative opens with black and white footage of May 15, 1948, the day after Israel’s creation as a state. Woolcock often intercuts the black and white (pseudo-documentary) past with the colour present, an emblem of the past as a persistent ghostly presence. In choosing how to define that source of the conflict, Woolcock stays within Goodman’s blinkers. She takes the Palestinian perspective — that the birth (and the continuing existence) of Israel was a disaster to the Arabs. The alternative emblem is the Arab nations’ refusal to accept a division of the land with their own new state and instead amassing immediately to destroy the Jews. When Woolcock cites the 3.7 million Palestinian exiles she frames out (i) their descendancy from the original number of “only” 750,000; (ii) the equal number of Jews who were at that time dispossessed and expelled from the Arab countries; and (iii) the other Arab nations’ refusal to accept their refugees the way Israel accepted the Jewish ones. That would make those Arabs not the Israelis responsible for the Palestinians’ generations of suffering. Clearly, the issue is too complex for any such shorthand.
Woolcock begins with a specific incident where a young Israeli, a concentration camp survivor,whipped and tattooed, leads a raid which expels the Arab family from which Mamoud will descend. That Israeli and his wife are among the hostages on this Achille Laura. Unlike the libretto Woolcock includes several obvious Jews among the hostages in addition to the Klinghoffers. As the other Jews are not per se singled out for abuse the implicit effect is to exempt the terrorists from anti-semitism, beyond Rambo’s rhetoric. Klinghoffer becomes “the chosen” victim not because he bit an attacker (here) or exposes the terrorists’ false-idealist bloodlust but because Rambo drew his passport at random from a passenger’s bag. When Rambo steals and smashes the Israeli’s watch it could be anyone’s. Woolcock also dropped the woman passenger’s embarrassment to admit she’d felt grateful not to be a Jew. Rambo's speech is the only sign of anti-semitism in a project historically based on the denial of the Jewish right to survive. Finally, the presence on board of Mamoud’s nemesis might be taken to justify the attack. In sum, the film like the libretto whitewashes the terrorists’ anti-semitism. In reality Hamas, of course, is constitutionally pledged to annihilate all the Jews, not just the Israelis, and the ostensibly “moderate” Abbas refuses to accept the “Jewish state,” without it being swamped by the refugees. Still, Mamoud’s increasing disenchantment with the movement is a balancing addition.
Another is the inclusion of the Jews' historic suffering. After the ship’s boarding in Genoa Woolcock cuts in footage of Jewish refugees fleeing their cemetery of Europe for Palestine in 1946. (There’s no mention of the 1922 world commitment of the entire Palestine for the Jewish state, including not just the now contested Judea and Sumeria but also what became Jordan.) Later a scene of Arabs slaughtered (cited in the libretto) is balanced by Jews in the concentration camps (which wasn’t). When we see the one side’s slaughtered while hearing about the other, there’s a questionable equation implied between the people threatened with annihilation (the Jews) and the people who decades later again plot that people’s annihilation(the Palestinians). That’s no equivalence.
Woolcock takes advantage of her physical settings to make some touching additions. In playful foreshadowing the five-year-old boy shoots his space gun first at the amiable Klinghoffer, then at the four terrorists as they go to prepare their weapons to attack. There is little room for innocence in this world. In the newly taken town an Israeli teacher erases the Arabic from the blackboard. She doesn’t have to write anything; the erasure makes the point. Mamoud inherits from his mother their old housekey in hopes of someday reclaiming their home. As they wear the key on their neck their memory can be read as a burden. Woolcock cuts from the Jews partying in their cabin -- and Mrs Klinghoffer's "L'Chaim," "To Life" -- to the terrorists prepping their weapons and impulsively killing the maid. The contrast defines both sides.
As in the libretto the terrorists don’t refer to Allah. Further to enable our empathy Woolcock puts them into matching khaki business suits, until Rambo strips down to his Sly t-shirt. She sets up a praying scene, though, when three roll out their mats. Like Miller, she lets us think they share our god.
Woolcock uses British TV to record the outside world’s response to the incident. Jon Snow is the tony reporter. Instead of Hagar’s Chorus describing the two peoples’ fraternal derivation from Ishmael and Isaac a Middle East specialist tells that story. Rambo stares at Klinghoffer before angrily turning off the set, denying such brotherhood. Woolcock moves the party girl’s airhead remembrance ahead to a post-landing press conference.
Woolcock then shifts back to dramatize the four terrorists’ radicalizing. Mamoud, his beautiful girlfriend and three buddies witness Israeli soldiers knocking over a fruit stand and killing the merchant. A spray of pamphlets introduce them to the radical cause and the men lock hands over the Koran. A title — “Islamic fundamentalism flourishes in a climate of despair” — introduces Woolcock’s most dramatic addition. Our four heroes are in the mob that stones his girlfriend for not wearing a hijab in public. When we later see her her face is still badly burned and bruised and she hides behind the cover. This addition diminishes the terrorists beyond anything in the libretto.
Where the libretto Klinghoffers seemed burdened with bathos and the Jewish comic stereotype, the performance elevates them. Klinghoffer is made likeable and brave. He poses comically for a passenger’s camera. His diminishing, silly soliloquy (“I should have worn a hat”) is made touching and emotional when he delivers it in close-up to assure his cuddling wife. As Rambo coldly watches the loving couple the murder seems to grow out of his envy. She watches two terrorists cruelly toy with her crippled husband below and sleeps through the sound of his shooting (which we see here, but only heard about in the libretto). After the murder, into the unawares Mrs Klinghoffer’s face Rambo sings of having taken the Jew’s filthy money. His callousness and her dignity reverse the bias in the libretto.
Mamoud is moved by Mrs Klinghoffer’s first aria. Her finale segues through three settings. In the first her rage shrinks the captain. In the second she is passive as two women passengers change her clothing to prepare her to disembark. In the third she sings her memories of her husband to the passengers and reporters gathered on the pier. Her dignity, impassioned singing and emotional force gain majesty from the respectful faces of the listeners. The film makes her the clear hero and the dominant spirit, in contrast to her fatuous stereotyping in the libretto.
In short, Woolcock has respected the parameters of Goodman’s pro-Palestinian text but has taken definite measures to make the political argument less biased. That political sensitivity is as impressive as her truly inventive approach to filming an opera.
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