Driver (Israel, 2017)

“A story is never a lie,” Nachman Rosumani tells his assistant. He encourages him to ramp up the pathos in his personal plea for a charitable handout. 

That’s true insofar as a real story and an invented story can have equal effect on either the teller or the told. The emotional truth trumps the incidental. Indeed Nachman works himself up to tears as he invents a story for his aide to explot. As one bereaved observes, "Everything melts." 

This Orthodox Jewish elaboration upon Paper Moon centers on a conman and his sensitive young daughter. Driver Nachman sends his adult male assistant off to specific addresses with a tale of woe to solicit personal donations. They will split the proceeds fifty-fifty. The con depends upon  the Jewish commitment to tzedokkah, charity. It works, more or less, until someone steals Nachman’s notebook, with personal details on all the wealthy men in the orthodox Jerusalem community of Bnai Brak. Then "What's a driver worth without addresses?"

The film is a gossamer tissue of stories. Characters reprise their dreams. The cafe denizens take turns recalling their first memory. The characters’ lives are enriched by their memory of, for example, a cat discovered nursing its newborn in a dark basement, or recollecting the smell of the rebbe’s wife’s egg hitting the margarine. If not enriched, then explained: Nachman’s is his four-year-old son’s recent death, after which nothing was the same.

Their business schemes begin as stories. One man plans to fill a borrowed truck with stolen prams, to sell in the West Bank. That brainchild is replaced by another, to drive a truckload of snow from Jerusalem to sell as a cavorting pleasure in Bnai Brak, where it never snows.

The climactic revelation of “story” is the film’s last shot. When Nachman’s buddies deliver the snow they discover the neighborhood has just been thus miraculously blanketed. The last shot is that freakish setting, an obviously false image of an urban snowscape pocked with the local citizens. They are static, like cutouts or figures painted into the backdrop. Or they are frozen stiff, caught in the “story” not to be warmed by it.

The last shot’s artifice confesses to the fictitiousness of the narrative we’ve been watching. Of course we know we’ve been watching ”a story” as if it were real life. We always do. But here the artifice is the key message of the shot. Even the false shot is as effective as the “real,” which really isn’t either. 

Nachman is committed to stories. To pass the time he phones any nearby payphone and asks the passerby to tell him “one little story.” 

In the first such episode, the elderly Hedva reports her old husband Shmuel doesn’t remember her anymore. She wants to restore his memory by playing his favourite Beatles record but she has no phonograph. Nachman notes her address, as if planning to help. When she returns home we see her husband remembers her — but she doesn’t recognize him. Truth and pretence are inextricably confused. 

Nachman has become such an accomplished fabulist that even his simple truth can work. Coming upon an amusement park closed for the winter, his simple request convinces the caretaker to open to give Nachman and Channi a ride on the ferris wheel. 

More seriously, Nachman and Channi score big even though the donor recognizes him as the driver who brings him all the beggars. Indeed the donor had cheaply turned away Nachman’s last agent. As it happens, Nachum’s winning story here is apparently the truth —  his son’s death and his broken-hearted wife’s retreat to Tel Aviv. Nachum and Channi don’t need their “story” of her expensive and urgent surgery. Even when Nachman declines the money, "Do me a favour--take it." The emotional story performs a human value, true or false.  
     This superb, quiet drama is written and directed by Yehonatan Indurksy who, with Ori Elon, conceived and wrote the brilliant television drama Shtisel. The interplay between levels of reality is also a central theme in that drama. It’s in the opening scene — Akiva’s dream discovering his recently deceased mother freezing in a deli lunch with an Eskimo. It’s in the first season’s closing scene — Malka isolated from her family, her TV cruelly disconnected, left in its snow. It’s in the first season’s last shot, Malka and her dead husband watching her hospital coma scene in Heaven on the TV forbidden her on earth. It runs through the various forms of art in both seasons, as well. For my episode-by-episode analysis of the structure and themes see my book Reading Shtisel, available at lulu.com, amazon and barnes & noble.