Seven Minutes in Heaven (2008)

Omari Givon’s Seven Minutes in Heaven is a modern study in survivor guilt. Instead of the Holocaust, here Galia survives a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. Her fiancee, Oren, dies but Galia survives, scarred both psychologically and with serious burns on her body.

The film opens with Oren in his coma, Galia by his side, then he dies. It ends with Oren and Galia marrying. But instead of the wedding being a flashback the body of the film is a flash forward from the pre-narrative bomb scene. As one character explains, some souls are not ready to depart at their time. So they have a chance to see what their future lives would be. After that out of body experience they can make one change before they return to their bodies. 

In this case, Galia foresees her life without Oren and her seemingly accidental encounter with Boaz. This handsome engaging man turns out to have been the paramedic who kept her alive at the bombing. Though she and Boaz had been attracted to each other since the first time they met, at a Purim party, and though they make love now, she opts to recover Oren instead. Returning with Boaz to the scene of the bombing, she this time tells Boaz that Oren is still on the bus, so he’s recovered before the initial version’s second and fatal blast. 

The film brilliantly captures the psychology of a terrorist attack victim. The trauma haunts them. At the second Purim party Galia sees bleeding faces among the partiers. She imagines scenes with Oren. She spots a woman from the fatal bus on the street. 

The survivor can feel a crippling sense of unworthiness. Galia is withdrawn, standing apart even at Oren’s funeral. She is wary of any new relationship, even as her sister approves of Boaz. She feels guilty of Oren’s death because their quarrel made them late for their usual buses and put them on the fatal trip. She even feels guilty for not having responded to the suspicious young man on the bus, sweating as he revs himself up to suicide. Like so many Holocaust survivors, she feels guilt for having survived what so many didn’t.

Her burn undersuit is an emblem of her hypersensitivity. It’s like a protective shell she must wear to heal, protecting her both from the air and from her own compulsion to scrape her itchy skin. When she learns that her new lover was the paramedic she flees him and submits herself to harshly scratching her flesh, as if to mortify away guilt. Having embraced Boaz as a new life, learning his identity returned her to the bomb scene, her old life, her old guilt about Oren. Boaz doesn’t bring her a new life but a reminder of the old. After such an experience no forgetting is possible, nor any wholly new life free from the wounds of the experience. 

That may explain her decision to save Oren. She can’t leave him behind, nor presume to live a life as if that terrorist act had not occurred. Faced with lifelong guilt, loss and trauma she avails herself of the legend of the returning unready soul to save Oren. At their first meeting Boaz is dressed as Dracula. At first the costume seems paradoxical, because to Galia he is the purest giver, not drainer, of life. In context, however, he comes to represent her abandonment of her past life, her acceptance of her terrible loss, rather than the miracle of rewriting her life.

That soul story is obviously the stuff of legend not hard science. So this psychologically rich and politically attuned drama draws a happy ending out of a fiction. It’s like the miracle that saves the day in the otherwise hard-headed neorealist Miracle in Milan. So harsh is the life this film records that it takes an unbelievable miracle to find a happy ending. There is no completely happy ending without that fictional intervention.

The film does not get into the politics of Israeli life, who the suicide bombers were and what their intention was. Suffice it to expose the pervasive damage the terrorists did and the heroism of the Israelis who dealt with the murders and persisted to preserve their rich and remarkable society.
     The film implicitly raises an important reminder: Why Israel built that wall against the Palestinian terrorists. They needed it to stop the steady influx of suicide bombers, bent upon killing Jewish civilians in their buses, weddings, pizza bars, everywhere. It worked. Today, however, in their eagerness to condemn the Jewish state people often ignore the real cause of that wall and declare it proof of Israel’s supposed apartheid. This very moving, very insightful film reminds us of the terrible suffering that the wall was needed to end.