Echo

The tunnel may be an obvious metaphor in Amikam Kovner’s family tragedy, but it works —and even finds new twists of sunken meaning.

As tunnel engineer Avner’s marriage explodes he discovers the subterranean issues that separated his wife Ella from him. He’s been so preoccupied with error-free construction at work that he misses his psychiatrist wife’s problems with her professional depths. 

She feels guilty for having failed to prevent a client’s suicide. She slips into an affair with a young lawyer, drawn by his professional compassion for the victim’s demented mother. But Ella can’t leave Avner. Until she feels she can’t stay. 

Tunneller weds shrink. Beneath all those placid surfaces expect seismic rumbles. 

Avner’s stoic manliness is especially pointed in the Israeli context. Brisk, efficient, indomitable — Avner is the competent idealistic sabra. His own marital wound turns him against his basketball mate’s affairs with married women. 

But strength is no longer enough. As he remembers his last message from Ella, Avner’s perfectionism proves his fatal weakness when he holds himself above forgiveness. He refuses to allow his partners weakness in the tunnel, so by extension in the marriage. That provides the tunnel film’s title. Avner’s hollow rigidity — in the name of security — echoes across to Ella, driving her to death and him to ruin.

There’s yet another spin to these urban Israeli tunnels. As Israel remains under constant existential threat, Hamas in Gaza and Hezboillah in Lebanon have been building invasive tunnels into Israel with the avowed intention of abducting and murdering Jewish civilians. Taken together, the Israeli controlled tunnels she builds and the enemy tunnels she has to defend against call for a vigilant perfectionism, for very basic stability and for a grounding that is national as well as personal. The danger is, as Avner painfully learns, that the defensive strength it requires may diminish the survivor’s humanity.