As the title reference to a German film manufacturer reminds us, memories are depicted, recorded, inflected, possibly even created, by our visual records. From beginning to end, this film is rooted in the cinematic. This is a film about the irreality our perspectives give our “real” life. True to Brecht’s verfremdunseffekt, or “alienation,” the constant reminders that we’re watching a fictional film — not the real — confirm its plausibility.
The first shot is the fullscreen scream of an Asian kung-fu match on TV. That’s an imported war and its fascination. So, too, the wartime romanticism of the Casablanca film poster, in Hebrew — Americana Israelized. The American screen ethos returns uninflected in the Manhattan poster (in English) and the recurring Leonard Cohen songs, in the 1990s popular soundtrack fare. But the America to which the junkie here hopes to flee is where a cocaine fix is cheaper.
As the drama largely occurs in the single setting, Dahlia’s all-night bar, the spirit stays theatrical, evoking dramas like The Iceman Cometh and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — which Dahlia cites when her lovelife has sunk to “George and Martha.” The bar’s name, the Barbie, comes from the local mental institution, not from the US glamour doll a couple of tourists seek to buy. The film’s main setting thus matches Eli’s description of his home as “my catatonic house.”
Maverick cop Bennie fancies himself a Clint Eastwood. His Dirtier Harry tactics include corruption, violence, exploiting the helpless, in short, unbridled self-service. His demotion to a Northern posting will not cost him in title, pay or public rep. His superior’s dismissal as “a shitty little nothing” echoes his girlfriend’s earlier reduction of him to less than a zero. But this nothing wields damaging power.
The army comes off even worse. The soldiers seem to be storming an enemy when they approach the hospital to take their commander out for a break. Brazenly citing the (usually unfounded) allegations of Israeli army torture, the commander feels like “a hostage after we’ve ‘taken care’ of him.” In the bar the soldiers grow louder, more vulgar, more bestial with every drink and song, even ignoring Dahlia’s order to leave.
The corrupt Bennie wins our brief respect when he stops commander Nimy’s assault on the Arab kitchen worker Samri: “You have no authority here. This area is Israel. We’re all Israelis here.” Similarly, Bennie halts Nimy’s sexual assault on the helpless Ricky, then coldly seduces and abandons her.
The film’s violent opening leads to the plot’s conclusion — an all-out assault on the defenceless Barbie. First the Mizrachi pot-heads return to avenge one member’s having his head (not unjustly) scalded in humus oil. The original trio has accrued a Rambo.
They’re immediately followed by the soldiers Bennie expelled. Their attack on the Tel Aviv bar is filmed like an invasion of an enemy, especially as they attack rooms with grenades and spray the space with automatic rifles. They kill everyone, starting with the cop and ending with Dahlia.
Director Assi Dayan deliberately presents the action as filmed not lived. When film producer Eli walks away with his wife, he imagines himself in a film. He describes his last shot — the couple walking resigned into the dark — as they do. Eli has been running on his own “story.” He uses cancer as his excuse to visit Dahlia, but tells Dahlia the disease is his lie to be be free for her. Significantly, it takes an erotic TV scene to start Eli and Dahlia making love.
In another film convention. the poet/pianist Cherniak is a Dylanesque Hoagy Carmichael character, from his keyboard acerbically reflecting on the scene. He sings an open-eyed paean to the Arab Samri, whose people from among all people Allah has chosen to “f—- us up.” As Cherniak sings his song, “Right Here” — applying to the Barbie and beyond, to Tel Aviv, Israel, the Western world — “Wherever I went, I didn’t get anywhere. Everyone passes through accidentally, like in a short story or a monologue in a play.” No-one gets anywhere. “Whatever is to come, Nothing is going to happen.” Repeated at Dahlia’s request, this song concludes the film. To Dayan’s credit, he manages to end on a downer more down than Leonard Cohen.
Confirming the theme of film, Yarden is asked to shoot news photos for an absent photojournalist. Our flow of moving images often freezes on a stlll, reminding us that we’re watching a movie. Indeed the last shot is of the string of Barbie photos that have been posthumously preserved. That’s the afterlife film gives events.
The film references climax in the very last shot. That pan across Yarden’s still photo proofs moves out to the window, where the rooftop cityscape turns into colour.
Of course, when we watch a black and white film we accept the convention that it is a realistic representation of a colour world. When this entire black and white film ends on emerging colour we’re reminded that we’ve been indulging in an irreality.
Hence Bennie’s “annoying dream”: I dreamt I was asleep but I knew I was asleep.” Robbed of a dream, his waking career covers every corruption he can collect.
The self-referentiality goes beyond film, as we saw when Cherniak sang about a monologue. Even as we are constantly reminded we are watching a film, we are also in the wider area of storytelling. Dahlia summarizes her Eli affair as “the longest short story I ever told.”
This Tel Aviv is sunk in stories of downfall and loss. The common element is loneliness. The suicidal Ricky drifts through her one last abuse. Where Israel was born in the idealism and community of the kibbutz, here that ideal has shrunk to the taunting photo of her lost son and husband. Now Ricky finds “the city smells rotten” and “Being alone is a kind of landscape of this city” — anticipating the dull roofed lives of the ending. Her doctor finds this loneliness “a disease’ but Ricky shares it with the others. Her death is a fall into an un-Edenic garden.
Similarly, Dahlia may seem the social queen, as she warmly presides over the bustling pub party scene. But her one love is the cancerous married Eli. So every night Dahlia takes home some different soldier for stud service. There is no joy in this Mudville.
What’s especially intriguing is that these stories defining Israeli despair are told by Assi Dayan, son of the legendary leader of Israel’s founding army, Moshe Dayan. How does the son view the heritage? The film was made in 1992 but set “one year from now” — as if it projects an imminent future and is determined not to look back on the storied past. For Dayan fils 1992 Israeli life replays not the nation’s heroic past — whether Biblical or national — but the menial stuff of commercial film genres. And imported genres at that.
