Mountain

In Yaelle Kayam’s first shot an orthodox Jewish woman Zvia wends up through the flat tombstones of the Jewish cemetery on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives. In her last the woman walks down towards her house, on the edge of the cemetery, but disappears among the stones. 

We’ve seen her prepare two pots of stew. One she laced with rat poison, the other not. 

Which did she kill, her family or the prostitutes, pimps and druggies she has furtively watched, then started to feed? The holiest having failed her, she turns to the most secular. We are not told which. That means we’re not supposed to know. Which she killed is irrelevant. We see that she has been pushed to the point where she felt she had no other option but to make a dramatic action. The point is not whom she killed but that she had been driven to kill. That is the cost of an inhumane piety. 

A case could be made either way. She could have killed her family because of her frustration at her unloving and insensitive husband’s neglect and the burden he imposed on her, to raise their four children with him more a hindrance than a help. She could have killed the outsiders to rid herself of their fascination and to protect herself from the one who followed her home. When the sacred is so oppressive the profane has its allure. Either way, she has been pushed to desperation. 

Her meeting with a happy orthodox mother suggests Zvia’s religion is not the problem. The problem is Reuven’s rejection. He ignores her request he return the jam because it’s fattening. He supports the older daughter’s rebellion against her. He stays away late without warning. He assumes extra duties to stay away more. He rejects her affection and overtures.
     But an arranged marriage doesn’t have to be loveless, she knows, so she lies and tells Reuven that the Arab gravedigger told her he has a happy loving marriage with seven children.   

Zvia makes small rebellions. She smokes. She has short friendly chats with the Arab gravedigger. With her back to us she eats, furtively. With no clear motive in mind she spies on the cemetery intruders, then talks to a prostitute, then brings them meals and stays to watch them eat and have sex. Her final rebellion is the mortal one, a more dramatic action than those small ones. She acts in despair.

The setting is crucial. The Mount of Olives is where the Messiah will rise and raise the dead. Here instead of resurrection and a saviour we get the hopeless woman and her group murder. In the distance we can see the holiest mountain of the two faiths, the Jews’ Temple Mount and the Arabs’ Al Aqsa. One mountain, two natures and value systems and histories. But the title’s meaning is a third mountain still: the marital relationship that a couple must climb together for the marriage and family to survive. 

Instead the cemetery movement is usually horizontal here. As the first irritated couple finds, the cemetery is like a maze in which a mouse can get lost and fall prey. Zvia can navigate the cemetery maze and advise others, but in her flat, obscure marriage she finds no other way out but this violent one.

Reuven is completely immersed in his religion, his work at the yeshiva, and his family’s religious rites. He has one secular moment, when he whistles a favourite tune that he heard earlier in the day. It’s the theme of the Sergio Leone Western, The Good The Bad and The Ugly. It’s an odd thing for an Orthodox Jew to adopt. It shows he too has a secular interest that he perforce suppresses. More broadly, the theme from an operatic revenge drama sets us up for Zvia’s climax.
     Zvia’s parallel artistic allusion is the poetry she reads at the poet’s graveside.The poem she breaks down over expresses a neglected woman’s grief and the comfort offered by Death. Like Reuven’s tune, this secular poem suggests being steeped in the Talmud is not enough. We need the solace and the joys of this life too. Whichever group she has killed, she has effectively ended her own life.