Scaffolding

There are two kinds of scaffolding — i.e., the framework one constructs to enable the making —or remaking — of a more permanent construction. 

But what building will you dedicate yourself to do? The literal construction of some worldly thing, some edifice, or that more rarefied project — building a deeper, more human and responsible self? In an Israeli film, this question takes on significant political weight.Hence Asher's skirmish with a Muslim student who presumes to wear a shirt similar to his.

For Milo Lax, the only scaffolding that counts is his business, the construction sites that he runs and wants his son Asher to take over from him. He has that Edifice Complex that today drives so much industry, politics and most dangerously, education..

Milo is an ex-con who still barely checks his anger and violent impulses. His growth in life inhered in his managing to maintain something of a relationship with his 17-year-old son Asher after his wife left him. 

And build a successful scaffolding business. But of course, he’s only in on the beginning. Lax just puts up the scaffolding, in preparation for the construction crews to come do the major work.

Literal construction is all that Milo can see in his son’s future too. “When will you ever read a poem, see a play, read a book?” he rhetorically asks him. He insists Asher cover for him at work instead of studying for his matriculation exams. “Don’t go too high,” he orders, on the scaffolding as in life. 

Asher is tempted to accept the limitations his father sets. He too has a short fuse, violent impulses, and has serious learning disabilities to boot. 

But he also shows signs of curiosity, however minor and illicit. He searches idly through a client’s house, stealing a Russian doll, then his teacher’s, where he stumbles upon a forbidden secret. Here Asher intuits the appeal of entering someone else’s world, which we non-construction types do through literature.

His English teacher Rami offers him a glimpse of the other scaffolding, the world of literature, morality, questions, thinking, debate. He engages the boy in discussion. He tries to amend his brutishness. 

When Asher overhears Rami assigning another class to record questions they would ask of someone, Asher takes on the assignment. He submits the questions he could never ask Milo. 

While Rami teaches his class Greek tragedy he lives out his own. Unable to deal with his own existential doubts he kills himself, leaving his unnerved students and a bereft pregnant widow. 

The film ends with Milo and Asher grabbing a fast breakfast wrap in the truck, en route to the school. There Asher is to be questioned by police and perhaps arrested for breaking into Rami’s flat and finding, then airing, his suicide note. 

Finally Rami’s teaching gets through. Asher asks Milo the questions he couldn’t before: Why were you so strong in my life? Why did you and mom have me and then break up? Why didn’t you ever read me any stories? How do loving and beating go together? Those questions clearly define that family’s unquestioning, brutish dynamic.

Asher asks those questions of a man who was never interested in the earnest questions of life, just the scaffolding. We don’t know if he’ll answer or deepen his distance from his son with yet another evasion. 

But those questions are the significant scaffolding Rami unwittingly left Asher with. Can Asher finish the job with the real construction? He can’t count on his dad, who does only the other scaffolding. His scaffolding is Lax. 

Whatever happens at school or with his father, Asher is on his own. But at least he has been introduced to literature, to ideas, to questioning — the important questions, not the knee-jerk belligerence of the Israeli teen. 
      Who knows? Maybe Asher will make a movie.