Sunday, July 14, 2019

A Tramway In Jerusalem

Amos Gitai presents the title’s two phrases in reverse: In Jerusalem A Tramway. It first establishes the place, then the means of entrance. This slice-of-life miscellany takes us East-West through the Jewish and Arab districts of the Holy City. In both the political and personal stories, people are on the same tram but going “in different directions,” as the brittle couple Moshe and Didi remark. 
     The film is in the tradition of the old narrenschiff -- The Ship of Fools. A cross-section of human society reveal themselves and their relationships in a confined vehicle of transport, a reduction of the journey of life. The American classic is Stagecoach (1939).
Despite an apparent incoherence, the film has a firm structure. It’s framed by scenes of two beautiful women profiled on the left side of the screen singing. The opening song (declared at 5 a.m.) is the joyous Hebrew hymn Hasheeveinu: “Turn us back, O Lord to You, and we will turn. Renew our days as before” (Lamentations 5:21).  At the end a beautiful Palestinian woman sings an Arabic song (pssst: I’d welcome a translation), accompanying herself atonally with castanets. 
In the pivotal Episode 6 (at 19:12) a Palestinian man declares the Oslo Accord delusional in its treatment of Judea and Samaria. He sullenly predicts there will never be a Palestinian state. The pretty woman with him rejects his despair. She won’t be considered “a demographic problem. A thorn in the ass,” but retreats to a long silent meditation. That’s like the woman at the end of the first episode, but far more melancholy. The film’s finale will finally give the Palestinian woman a voice. 
Between the women’s perspective in #1 and #6 fall scenes of male authority — and folly. In #2 (set at 12:31) the camera zooms past an orthodox Jew’s wordless banjo number to a French father and his young son, lying together in pensive warmth. Other passengers sing along happily. The communal singalong resumes in #3 at 18:45, with a religious/political point: “The world is a very narrow bridge. What’s really important is not to be afraid at all.” 
The singing is replaced by a dubious yeshiva lecture in #4 (19:34). The earnest young scholar explains that the Torah advises that shooing the mother bird away from her nest is humane. It saves her from seeing she is losing her children. That’s a guy thing. Her loss is hardly eased by her not seeing it happen. For this tight exclusive knot of men, religious logic betrays human responsibility and values secrecy over responsibility. The political pertinence is obvious.
In #5 the religious tension is replaced by the purely secular enthusiasm of the Beitar Jerusalem soccer club fans, screaming wildly behind the new coach and his team’s loquacious PR man. The woman interviewer (“a journalist and poet”) earnestly asks the  English speaking coach team questions but he is continually drowned out by the PR man’s bulldozing enthusiasm. And lies: “I hate humus!” “It’s so typically Israeli,” the coach observes, “I can’t say a word.” When the scene closes on his long, silent left-screen pensiveness, he shows the same rueful marginalization and impotence the women in #1, #6 and the finale show.
At 21:18 episode #7 introduces the personal, emotional form of the city’s divisions. The blonde Gaby is saved from the security guard’s sexual harassment (“I want to get to know you”) when she spots her older woman friend Mali. She shows off her new, impossibly high-heeled shoes — bought to wear to bed. Gaby is locked into an illicit affair with a man she doesn’t love, hardly knows but can’t bring herself to escape. Like those other women and like the alien football coach, she ends the scene in a long, sad meditation over her troubled relationship. Romance and politics converge in her analogy: “It’s as if we were both secret agents in enemy territory.” 
Both arenas are redefined by religious tradition at 21:22 when a frocked Christian ranter replaces the security guard who’s moved in beside Gaby. The priest brushes her hair, then becomes the mad prophet. “If you don’t scream ‘Long live liberty’” with humility, with laughter, with love, then you’re not supporting liberty. He inveighs against those who scream it with contempt, rage, hate. He retells Jesus saving the adulteress from the crowd of sinners. “Only the truth will set us free,” his Jesus said rebelliously. 
This prophet runs on into another discreet episode, specifying different times, as if in recognition of the Christ story reccurring across time. Here Gitai draws on Pasolini’s realistic film presentation of the Gospel According to St Matthew. At 21:37 the priest is holding an open Bible. At 21:58 he describes Christ at Gethsemane, filled with sorrow at the continuing tragedy of the willing spirit and the weak flesh. He closes on the consignment of all sinners to “the second death,” to eternal Hell. The scene closes ambiguously on “And he showed the holy city of Jerusalem.” Is the modern Jerusalem the holy or the hellish?
In #10, at 23:40, the French tourist reads to his son one answer, Flaubert’s report on his own disenchanting visit. Flaubert is irreverent. Farting at the Holy Gate, even he is “upset at my ass’s Voltaireanism.” Flaubert finds Jerusalem a tomb of rotting religions, fake, propagandist, exploitative, its sects locked ironically in mutual hatred. “We did see hyocrisy, greed…but no fucking trace of holiness.” Deprived of his expected pleasures of either religious excitement or hatred of the priests, Flaubert feels “emptier than a barrel.”  While his father recites Flaubert’s cynicism the son plays on the car’s supporting bars.  
A sadder, funnier parental relationship follows, at 23:12. A mother berates her divorced, loser son for having failed to provide a grandchild. She recalls the squinting nerd schoolboy Aaron Goldman.who used to wear a key on his neck because of bis neglectful mother. Now he’s blossomed into a neurosurgeon with two beautiful daughters. Our heroine is indignant at her own unrewarded sacrifice. 
Gitai centers the camera on her, with her failure son marginalized on the left. To the right is a yeshiva man who can’t touch her or accept a piece of her apple because he’s a bachelor. He feels commanded to ignore the world around him: “Study as you travel.” The woman advises that if a man prays at the Kottle (Wailing Wall) for 40 consecutive days “They will provide him with a woman.” An unseen man across the aisle fell in love with a gentile woman, who converted for him but then grew so religious that he was not Jewish enough for her.  
A parallel relationship follows, at 4:54. Waiting for the tram to take him back to his unit, a young soldier is kept out of focus on the right as he sings, dances and cavorts for his girlfriend. She occupies the left foreground like the solitary women in #1,6 and the end. He plays her “Dark Eyes” (Orchy chornya) on the harmonica, still in soft focus as if viewed through her suppressed tears.  When he says he doesn’t want her to stop living in his absence, to see his friend Moti, she reveals she has already invited Moti to date her in his absence. He has a car. Also another friend, a tall disc jockey. Her beau’s “Have fun” turns bleak. 
The sexual tension thickens in #13, at 5:16. An Israeli woman is paranoid at the perceived threat of an Arab man bringing on the tram  — paradoxically — palm branches. At her aggressive suspicions, the dangerous security guard confronts him, demands his ID, then throws him to the ground and calls for support. The scene closes on the woman’s frightened, aloof face, right screen, looking away.  
Episode 14 implies some context for that paranoia. A theatrical couple get on, with prop cat and dog playing at conflict. The man reveals that when he worked for Jews, he greeted every order with “Inshallah” — “God willing.” While the Jews took that as assent, he meant it as “No.” As a restaurant dishwasher, he had an affair with the 60-year-old woman owner.  Then he got a job as a newspaper reporter from Gaza, dodging snipers form both sides. The end of the war still left a senseless situation, so he turned to interviewing models. 
At 21:03 this politics intensifies. A TV talk show host is recognized by a couple at the station. On the train he previews his upcoming show, by reading a 1917 Trotsky tract calling for a permanent revolution against the injustices of capitalism. 
In contrast, at 20:12 — the carefully calibrated time scheme skips a day here, i.e., is meaningless, a pretence to passively recording an uncreated reality — two women meet over sharing a light in the station. One is an ascetic, mixed nationality Jewish blonde, the other an earthier, fuller lipped, dark beauty. They bond over their resistance to power, whether in their men or against the security guard who probes their IDs. “Considering what this country is turning into,” he says, “I wonder at you two together.” But that’s nothing political. 
As if to embody the women’s danger, at 22:02 a woman on the left side of the screen is forcibly confronted by her ex-lover, the brutish security guard. She leaves with “What I loved about you was your smell.” His scene-end meditation on that left edge has a tense, dangerous tone quite opposite to the matching women’s. 
The next episode is a quiet interlude. A caesura. From the tram’s front perspective, at 23:07 the train arrives at a station. The pause in the human dramas simply re-establishes the setting. It expresses the train’s single direction, in contrast to its conflicted passengers’. That also spans a considerable lapse of time. For at 18:45 a Palestinian rapper resumes the political argument: “How strong are you without a gun?…Palestine is not a land. Palestine lives within us… Who are you, crazy Israel?”  The Israeli passengers read on, unperturbed. We’re told specific times for each scene but not how many days elapse. That’s how the poetic event transcends the historic, happening not just once but over and again.
At 9 a.m. a fiddler performs in front of a Jewish couple. This parallels the harmonious banjoist in #2. But the romantic potential is quickly dispelled. Moshe and Didi broach divorce. Her “constant hostility ruins [his] appetite.” She cites his sterility and reluctance to adopt. He doesn’t want to raise a child in the crazy, dangerous country. He can’t forgive her for sleeping with his best friend five years ago when she thought he’d been hit by a missile. “We’re going different ways.”
  In contrast, an apparently harmonious couple meet the French tourist father at 14:50, and discuss his impressions of Israel. The couple extoll the miracle of their “small and fantastic people,” especially the heroism and democracy of their military. But Mr. Chelsea keeps praising the sun and the sand, the tourist face of the place. Finally Mrs Azoulay confronts him: “What do you have against our army?” He flees to his son. 
From that contrast between the Israeli tourist face and its existential survival, the film ends on two women’s performances. Before the closing Arabic singer, a wildly tressed redhead recites a German poem reaffirming humanity in the face of its threat. “There’s a weeping in the world, as at the saviour’s death. Let’s huddle together.” “When we look at each other our eyes blossom. We’re astounded by our own miracle…. I believe we are angels.” This poem attempts to bridge the abysses between the people we’ve met here, whether as lovers or as political opponents. That is clearly the director’s intention, in traversing the troubled landscape with characters trapped in the turmoil. 
One end credit cites the sources: Flaubert, Pasolini, Deuteronomy, Else Lasher-Schuler’s poem of the Apocalypse, and Israeli writers Asaf Tsipor, Sayed Kashua and Yohosaghua Kenaz, an appropriate mix of Arab and Jewish voices — like the film’s framework of songs.  Gitai confirms his status as a leading creative voice on Israel's endangered species Left.
 

 

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