Monday, December 9, 2019

A Tale of Love and Darkness

In the pre-credit sequence Amos’s mother makes up a story to put her son to sleep, i.e., to bring on the darkness. This darkness is restorative, nourishing a vital part of the progress and cycle of living. Ominously, it’s a horror story: a little boy is the last survivor in a village . After a heavy rain birds swarm with such intensity they blacken the sky. This is the inner story of love and darkness. In the larger version, Amos’s mother kills herself at 38, succumbing to the melancholia that has sapped her energy and joy in life. The profound darkness that takes her away has attended her love.  
Most immediately, Natalie Portman’s adaptation of the Amoz Oz novel memorializes his mother Fania, who gave her son unquestionable love, a fascination with storytelling and a cultivated sensitivity. When the boy angrily pledges not to become a writer but a farmer — or a dog poisoner — he antithetically anticipates the film’s last scene, where he picks up his father Aryeh with a tractor and takes him to his kibbutz. Outside the text, though, we know Amos became a writer. The two actors providing the writer’s face and his voice add an extra-textual spin to the closing kibbutz scene. In the last shot Amos starts to write, beginning with "Mother." In the narrative's frame, the film opens with Fania telling him a story and ends with him writing hers.    

Love and darkness intermingle throughout. Each implicitly attends the other. Aryeh dedicates his debut novella “To brother David, lost in darkness.” Fania recalls the woman whose husband wagered her sexual use in card games — and lost. By leaving him she loses her daughter’s respect -- so she burns herself alive. “Our children don’t realize how much they can hurt us.” 

Amos’s fascination with Tarzan is itself a mixed blessing. Initially, playing the jungle hero leads to his accidental injury of the little Arab boy. That breaks Amos’s poetic connection to the boy’s sister. But later Amos deflects bullies’ assault by intriguing them with his invented Tarzan serial. His storytelling gift proves a practical defense. 

Amos learns the world through the stories he’s told and we see. In the anecdote of the silent monks who saved the drowning woman, was carrying her a sin? The question itself becomes a burden. 

In contrast to her own experience of a critical, unforgiving mother, Fania endows Amos with love and wisdom. “It’s better to be sensitive to others than honest.” “You can find hell and paradise in any room.” “Nobody knows anything about anyone, even themselves.” Hence the enigma of the Russian soldier who killed himself, leaving behind a girl’s love-note.    

Fania’s story eventually connects and mirrors that of the state of Israel. The UN General Assembly vote (by a 34-vote margin) to create two states out of the British Mandate occurs at Lake Success, the opposite to the Vale of Tears that emblematizes Fania’s melancholy. Arye predicts “Everything is about to change.” A Jewish state will end the bullying of Jewish boys in schools around the world. 

     But freed from the British, their erstwhile victims do not find common cause: “Two children of the same abusive father don’t necessarily become allies.” Indeed, “the worst conflicts occur between two persecuted people.” And so now “The only way to keep a dream alive is not to fulfill it.” Reality always brings a compromise. “Disappointment is the nature of dreams.” 

     In addition to the violence and deaths, Fania finds that even Israel’s realization of her national dream has caused the loss of that impelling passion. She stops telling stories. She releases Arye to find another woman, but “You can come home anytime you like.” Unable to help her, Arye sends her to holiday with her two sisters in Tel Aviv. As the older Amos muses, “Perhaps when life failed to fulfil her fantasies she saw Death as a fulfilling lover. In that guise, the handsome young man from her earlier fantasies releases her from her paralytic withdrawal.

At this point Fania’s tragedy seems to open into Israel’s.  The Oz family drama extends outward to reflect upon the State of Israel, fresh from its 1945 British Mandate and the 1948 declaration of the official Jewish state. The theme is introduced when the narrator compares the continually conquered, continually recovered, Jewish city to a black widow spider, that devours her lovers when they are still inside her.   

The narrator considers alternative versions of his stories. The soldier could have been saved from his suicide. The drowning woman could have been saved without consequence to the pilgrim monks. But it was her story to tell, her life to live. 

Does Amos stay in his kibbutz retreat from the story-teller’s destiny his mother began? That is, does the Amos of the film remain detached from the Amos Oz we know wrote the novel  behind this film? In the last shot Amos writes “Mother” in a notebook. At the end of the film the source novelist starts to write his mother’s story. The film began with her telling one and ends with her becoming one. His. And through the film, ours.  


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