Madam Yankelova's Fine Literature Club

This post-feminist Gothic thriller reminds us that not all of Israel’s very fine cinema is concerned with religion or politics. 

Or does it? Beneath the genre innocence here there is a reflection on the inescapability of traditional political structures (aka strictures). 

The plot takes off from Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. A mysterious secret organization of women stage lavish evenings of erotic force. But this group is dedicated to the denial of love. There is no such thing as love, these women avow, as they celebrate escape from its traditional thrall. 

Women members have to bring suitable specimens of men to the weekly celebration of fine food and literature. Indeed the organization even runs a library and neighbouring residence (“No men allowed”) for its entry level members.

The evening’s pretence is to celebrate fine literature. Hence the library front, where ideas and culture provide the lure that might otherwise be the raised skirt at a highway pickup (though that may be deployed as necessary too). In the event, the men are captured, killed and — by implication — ground up and re-cased as wieners, for sale at the community park hot dog stand.

That’s the film’s central metaphor: these women reduce the male phallic power to weenies. From hot stud to hot dog in one eve, literature the lure. As women have been, these men are measured, reduced to statistics, and rated on a percentage scale, though the calibrations are on the head not bust, hips and waist. Progress.  

The plot gives the women the ruling authority and power. Madam Jankelova herself is the traditional old crone, shrunken but still the unquestioned authority. Her main lieutenant Razia also happens to be the town’s police chief, so this underworld society directly parallels the legitimate one outside. Her position lets her hide the missing men files the sorority has been producing.

But this women’s revolution is dramatically incomplete.  As heroine Sophie’s chief rival demonstrates, even these liberated women fall back on the flirtation and sexual coquetry from which their new power ought to have liberated them. Further, male authority and power are far from superseded here. It’s a male writer, the Hebrew Nobelist S.Y. Agnon, whose works are celebrated and used as bait.  There's even a "guy," "Yankel," hiding in the boss-lady's name. 

Perhaps the point is that however liberated these women may be, however collectivized their efforts, even their new system falls into the reductions of the old. 

Despite their sisterhood, bitter rivalries and betrayals persist, as in the library staff tensions, the spying, the hunting down and killing of the one escapee Hannah. Even here the women are reassigned to be the cleaners — and abused at that — when their beauty has faded and they can no longer attract suitable prey.  The privileged class of Lordesses — which our Sophie needs but one more trophy to join — is an Old Boys Club in furs. The woman police chief can be as corrupt and unprincipled as the male police chief, to suit personal needs. 

The same compromise is required by the genre, whose conventions are revived — perhaps tongue-in-cheek — for the happy ending. Sophie turns the knife upon her own leader instead of on her beloved captive. But it’s he — the guy — who saves the day. He bolsters the door with an incendiary barrel, lets Sophie escape first, then knight-like carries her to safety and on his motorcycle steed off to a romantic future.
      Like genre literature, even a revolutionary social structure still requires the old conventions and restrictions to work. Even in contemporary Israel? Do we need a more radical revolution?