The Slut

This sexually explicit drama is of special interest because its lead actress, Hagar Ben Asher, also wrote and directed the film. All superbly.

Only the cell phones establish the contemporary setting of this rural Israeli community. Otherwise its examination of the transactional nature of female sexuality in society could be any time in history.

The heroine's name, Tamar, evokes the Genesis heroine who avenged herself on her father-in-law Judah for breaking his promise of providing the twice-widow with her third husband (after seed-spiller Onan!). Tamar posed as a roadside prostitute to become pregnant by Judah — then exposes him. That falsely accused prostitute undercuts the heroine’s reduction by the film’s (English) title. 

We know nothing of the film Tamar’s past. She works as an egg-seller (aptly enough) and is a loving, responsible mother to her two young daughters. (The Biblical Tamar had twin sons out of Judah.) When her maternal responsibilities allow, she freely gives sexual services to the local men who help her. The bike repairman even provides bikes for her two daughters — her service implicitly in exchange for goods. 

In these transactions Tamar takes various degrees of seeming pleasure and detached interest. She shows no desire for a fuller relationship. These encounters give her fleeting connection and practical benefits. By providing only manual or oral sex she keeps control over the men. But the Hebrew title, HaNotenet, means the more general "giving woman." Consistent with that, the sexual offerings are not on a quid-pro-quo exchange basis. There is rather the atmosphere of individuals giving what they can and getting what they need. It's like sexual socialism.

        Tamar changes when she goes to bed in an emotional, non-transactional way with Shay, the vet who has returned to his dead mother’s home. When she drops to fellate him he pulls her up for a fuller embrace. After the darkness and detachment of her servicing scenes, her full sex with Shay erupts in a golden glow. Now the sex is love. She invites his insemination and thrills him with news she is pregnant. At Shay’s invitation Tamar and her daughters move into his home. His ease with the girls suggest his potential fatherliness.   

So what goes wrong? That she loves Shay is clear from her phone calls and her pleasure at his comfort with her daughters. But her pattern of sexual barter inhibits her break from her past. She delays her users rather than denying them. To put off one client she deliberately spills a tray of eggs (shades of that Onan). Accustomed to using sex impersonally she seems unable to convert fully to the love with Shay. Perhaps frightened of the new emotion, or by her loss of control in the new intensity, she unilaterally aborts Shay’s child and uses his increasing engagement with her daughters to stay away from their home.  

Shay senses her increasing alienation. After he and the girls frolic in a pool he goes to get Tamar. When he spots her with a hastily fleeing partner Shay leaves her there and speeds home. He puts the girls to bed, the older one in his and Tamar’s bed. 

What ensues we don’t know but we see him stripping naked at the foot of the bed. Tamar returns and is shocked by what she sees through the window. We hear heavy breathing. At the least he may be masturbating (Onan again). This is entirely out of character. Perhaps Shay feels himself isolated, perhaps even unmanned by his new domestication, the abortion, Tamar’s infidelity. Perhaps here his sexual aberration parallels Tamar’s debilitating sexual pragmatism. 

After she has roused a neighbour, three men beat up Shay. In the last shot he lies in a foetal curl and she embraces him. The man who has led her back from cold sexuality to love is reduced to a helpless child. 

That finale suggests Tamar’s struggle to sustain love with Shay against the sexual determinism that is woman’s fate. Tamar’s pragmatic use of her sex has compromised her emotional life and freedom. The power she seems to deploy is still her radical restriction. Even in an apparently mutual “use” the male retains the advantage. That the daughters will grow into this dilemma is suggested in the scene where they — however still playfully — explore sexual embrace. 

The opening scene sets this theme. The camera pans across a quiet, pallid country field, arriving at a closeup of the legs of a handsome horse. Suddenly the mare breaks free, leaps a fence and runs wild — only to be knocked down by a motorist. Through the course of the narrative Shay heals the horse, enabling her to run off again. Like Tamar, the horse is a free natural spirit doomed to paying the world’s price on her freedom. As a healer, Shay is drawn to Tamar, but at the end both need each other to heal.