Love Trilogy: Stripped (2018)

  Yaron Shani’s Love Trilogy began with Stripped (2018), which very subtly introduced the violence and macho psychodrama later amplified in Chained (2019), previously discussed here. 

The central theme inheres in Alice’s assignment to her Cont Ed collage portraiture class: “Make yourself out of parts that aren’t you.”  Both the artist/writer/teacher/filmmaker Alice and the aspiring classical guitarist Ziv uncover uncharacteristic dimensions in themselves through their experiences, especially with each other. 

In the early sections of the film I was troubled by the apparently asynchronous conversation scenes. The dialogue and even music did not quite fit the characters’ movement of lips and fingers. This may have been a technical problem in the print.

Or not. This might be exposed as a narrative strategy at the very end, when the sounds of Alice’s school drawing class continue over the end credits. The image and the sound are more pronouncedly disjunctive than in the earlier conversations. 

More significantly, the narrative pivots on a radical shift in time. A present drama is revealed to have occurred much earlier — and most tellingly. If we do make ourselves up out of parts that aren’t us, it’s because time changes us, for better or worse, as our experiences require. Experience uncovers — or creates — our hidden elements. This is the film’s primary psychological theme.

That also gives the film a political dimension. It pointedly addresses the psychological cost of Israel’s perpetual self-defence, in the national draft that forms the vital army and in the citizenry that depends on it. This is the focus of the young guitarist’s “maturing” into a muscular, possibly overly assertive soldier. Initially he's apparently too shy to accept a girl's overtures. His family name is Zukerman, Sugarman. Such a sweet boy. But he changes -- to the detriment of all concerned.

Alice’s three — dramatically unmatched — dogs represent the life energies that can be harmonized, apparently domesticated, but their savage animal nature persists. Pent up, they growl danger. So, too, shy Ziv ripens into the hardened wiry warrior. This is the human — and social — nature that is stripped of its initial sensitivity. 

The teenage boys’ sexual initiation scene is an exercise of pathetic bravado, in the face of death, that the army will replay on a more serious level. In Alice we see the antithetic movement, into vulnerability, psychological disintegration and the labour of recovery.The titles of her two novels -- before and after the dramatic events of the plot -- record her movement from Rattling the Cage to Open Doors. Similarly, in the two exercises she assigns her class she moves from composing a presentation of one’s self to exploring another person. 

The boys’ sex scene contrasts to the scenes of women’s counselling and supportive companionship. Alice is initially drawn to include Ziv for her documentary on new combat soldiers because he is so atypical, apparently too sensitive, too feminine, for that reduction.  Ziv proves himself with a vengeance.