The Other Story

  A rhetorical device — okay, a trick — propels the theme of Avi Nesher’s The Other Story.Three times an emotional action appears to occur but is revealed immediately not to have happened. That is, we see one story. But then there’s another, that proves truer. 

In the first, when the divorced professional secular Jewish couple meet in the restaurant, Tali flings her glass of wine at Yonatan, staining his shirt. Then we see she didn’t. But we know she would have liked to. 

In the second, their orthodox daughter Anat accompanies Yonatan to find his patients’ kidnapped son in East Jerusalem. When she asks three Palestinian soldiers for directions her father sees the Palestinians machine gunning them down. But they don’t. The only Palestinians in the film coolly give the obviously Orthodox Jewish girl directions to — the convent! That’s where Rami is hiding with his son, Izzie.

The third such replay comes at the end, when Yonatan is flying back to America to face his company’s fraud charges. His father Shlomo and daughter Anat accompany him to the airport. After decades of her rage at his abandonment, Anat flings himself into his arms for an all-forgiving embrace. But that’s only what he’d like. Instead, she slowly, deliberately, walks towards him for a modulated gesture of acceptance.  

The last thing we learn is that Anat’s rejected fiance Shachar has a new pop song release titled “The Other Story.” Thereby hang some other tales. Anat has alienated her family by insisting on conversion to full orthodoxy. Zaida Shlomo, Tali and Yonatan conspire to break the engagement. They succeed when Yonatan compels Shachar to confess he’s still addicted to drugs. Anat won’t marry a liar.

But perhaps she will. Yonatan credits Shachar for having at last come clean to her, however under his pressure. More importantly, Anat has herself felt compelled to tell a lie — to serve a higher purpose, for the greater humanity religions are supposed to serve. 

Her counselor father shrewdly enlists her aid on a child custody case, as Shlomo did him. Rami is fighting to wrest custody from his wife Sari because he fears the boy’s abuse in her pagan feminist cult. Without Anat’s false confirmation of his having kidnapped the boy, Rami would be criminally charged and lose his son completely. Anat’s lie forces Sari to step back from the religion which she has been using rather than feeling — and to give their marriage another chance, for at least shared custody. She offers to make Rami tea.

Other “other stories” abound. Shlomo artfully summoned Yonatan home for his daughter’s wedding? Yes and no. He also wanted to give him a chance to escape the US fraud trial. But perhaps mainly: Shlomo feels old and wanted one last visit. That fraud trial itself has two stories: Yonatan claims to be innocent, but the evidence stands against him, but he really is guilty (as he admits to Shachar). And his partner Diana feels he has set her up and is betraying her.

The battling couple Sari and Rami seem Jewish enough, in their looks, their names, in their warm — okay, over-heated — style of marital discourse. As my friend Dahlia Beck pointed out, the family's names are based on the original family, Abraham, Sarah and Issac. Izzie's binding at the cult's ritual evokes Abraham's binding of Isaac, with the crucial difference of divine vs pagan command. Thus the apparently most secular family proves the most Biblical. Against their Jewish identity runs the collection of plush Christian paintings on their walls. As a tourist guide Rami takes his clients past the convent where they can see and buy the nuns’ excellent art. He gets a commission. Apparently Rami is open to that other story in religion, if not to his wife's. When he hides there with his son the head nun initially lies to protect them. At the end the couple separately open to another religion open to each other's story as well.

And so to the young Orthodox couple. Behind their fervid faith lies a torrid pre-conversion life, when they were heavily into the secular world of free sex and drugs. That story continues to be retold by the music video featuring their graphic sex and in her now embarrassing back-long tattoo. Their present frum-ness tells another story than their real past.

  The neckline Anat wants even more tightened on her wedding gown loosens when she joins her father’s campaign to save Ozzie first from his threatening father, then from Sari and the law. After breaking her engagement she leaves the Orthodox world completely, returning to her parents’ secular life, however angry she remains towards them. She leaves her Orthodoxy as easily as Sari abandons her cult, having pretended to worship their stone god only to intensify her feminist rebellion against Rami. 

This interweaving of fractured families, indeed of fractured selves, reminds us of the variability of values and perceptions.  Whatever conviction we may hold in our sense of history, of truth, there is always some “other story” to consider. A perspective may vary from one’s experience, from one’s values, or even from some higher purpose. Thus each character may discover a spectrum of truths as experience requires.

Though those three soldiers are the only Palestinians we see here, the validity of respecting “the other story” may well extend beyond the three separate families to the fractured state of Israel itself.