Longing

The title does not have an obvious fit to the narrative. But the complexities of desire — and the costs of its suppression — are clearly a central concern here. 

Interesting for an Israeli film — indeed the dominant Ophir (e.g.,Oscar) winner — this is a completely secular and personal drama. There are virtually no religious references, nor for that matter political. On both counts, that’s quite rare. There is a bit of religion at the funeral -- but the rabbi has only one other person there. 

Ariel is a successful bachelor industrialist. Old love Ronit left him because he didn’t want to have a child. Having been beaten by his own father, he feared perpetuating that violence, so stayed a bachelor. His fear inhibited any possible longing. 

  Now, 20 years later, Ronit looks him up to say that after he left her she bore his son Adam — who has just died in a traffic accident.

Ariel is so busy he can only spare her 45 minutes for their first meeting. So her appearance is a serious disruption. That grows. To attend Adam’s funeral Ariel takes more time off from his work. He then extends his stay further in order to learn more about his son. 

First Ariel learns Adam was involved in a big drug deal, which his best friend now asks Ariel to bail him out of. Ariel denies any responsibility for Adam. But he  proceeds to grow more involved in his dead son’s life. 

Adam (i.e.,the first man) converts Ariel into his first stirrings of fatherhood. Ariel suddenly starts to act like a father. He posthumously defends his son against his expulsion form school and his denial of graduation. He investigates his son’s tortured passion for Yael, his beautiful French teacher. 

Ultimately Ariel even contrives — with another bereft father — to arrange the dead son’s marriage to a dead girl, for marital bliss in whatever afterlife. Whether Taoism or plain romantic whimsey, the prosaic fathers commit a very romantic act in theoretical service to their dead children. Such an irrational romantic act could only come from hardheaded business types who have all their lives suppressed any romantic stirrings — and can’t maintain the dam any longer.  

Broken families abound here. Adam fought with his mother and her second husband until he fled to live with his then 12-year-old girlfriend’s family. 

Her father is a violent ex-con, who takes out on Ariel his rage at Adam having seduced his little girl. She’s pregnant, but her parents insist on her having an abortion rather than risk death as a 15-year-old mother. They resist Ariel’s passionate arguments. His offer of turning his entire fortune over to her if she bore his grandson is a dramatic change from his refusing to pay off his son’s 8,000 shekel drug debt. The businessman has learned the romantic gesture.

Despite his affair with the young girl, Adam pushed his impossible passion for his French teacher. Though she may have unwittingly encouraged him by coming to his band performance, she properly observed the ban on teacher-student relations. She’s less responsible in her affair with her school principal. 

  Like the school principal, Yael first expresses her high regard for Adam. As Ariel’s interrogation proceeds, however, that pretence crumbles. Adam was expelled for writing a beautiful, sexual and thus embarrassing poem about her — large on a wall across from the school. When he persisted in stalking her she came to hate him and finally reported him to the police. He died — or killed himself? — when he received that summons.  

In her beauty, Frenchness, culture, appeal to Adam and own love life, Yael virtually embodies Desire. She/it inspires Adam's book of love poems and especially the graffiti poem, so powerful it invades even the prosaic Ariel in an erotic dream.
     Yael finds Ariel as “relentless” in his interrogation as son Adam was in his ardor. That’s where the title comes in. Humans are creatures of longing. If a desire is denied, whether by another or by one’s self, it’s at a serious cost and with the danger of a larger eruption. This superbly scripted, imagined and realized psychological drama shows a man of self-denial finally releasing what he has so long suppressed. Of course, posthumously is too late.
      Of course, there is also a second kind of "longing." The secular characters on which this Israeli film opts to focus may have a spiritual longing as intense as the romantic. Hence the crackpot recourse to the marriage of two dead youth. The girl's mother, still unable to embrace the spirituality of the idea, tries to cancel the wedding when she hears the dead boy had one foot slightly longer than the other.
      Don't we all? We limp through life one foot in reality, the other in longing, whether on the road of romance or of faith.