Red Cow

Red Heifer would be a more appropriate title. It would replace the implication of bovine insentience with the tribal impulse to eliminate — the ennobling euphemism is “sacrifice” — something natural but irregular. That murder nominally serves the socially constructed “natural”. 

The obvious victim is the freakish red heifer, which is to be sacrificed on Rosh Hashannah to fulfill some biblical injunction. It will be killed, then burned, on the grounds that something unusual must be killed to protect the rather proscriptive version of God’s nature. 

  The other — more central — victim is the 15-year-old heroine Benny whose emerging sense of her lesbianism and increasing political awareness alienate her from her widowed father, Joshua. The first shot fills the screen with Benny’s cascading blonde/red hair. This introduction defines her in sensual, luxuriant terms. This is the natural beauty that here evolves into her lesbian passion, her sympathy for the pent and doomed heifer, her need to escape her father’s strictures and her own inhibitions. In the first shot she is starting to emerge from sleep (i.e., girlhood).

There’s another coming-of-age twist here. Joshua leads a radical movement against the Jewish ban from Temple Mount. As the film is set on the eve of Itzhak Rabin’s assassination, it prefigures Israel’s national shift of consciousness from its initial harmony into a new, internal violence.  

When Benny ultimately flees to Tel Aviv to make her own life amid that liberal modernity, where poems crop up around the corner, her personal quest reflects Israel’s potential shift away from archaic rituals into modern humanism. In contrast, the heifer stays put in its pen, even after Benny has offered her freedom. The question is whether Israel will turn modern or revert to its harsh orthodoxy. 

Though the woman writer/director Tsivia Barkai Yacov properly focuses on Benny, she makes Joshua an equally intriguing figure. He was widowed at Benny’s birth, so perhaps has made her too important a figure in his life. There are shots where his gripping her hand seems too firm. In naming her Benny he has made her his son (Ben) as well as daughter. In that spirit he lays the ritual teffilen with her, a rite not normally accorded women. He is remaking her in his image. 

Joshua admits to her his unfulfilled longing since his wife died, confirmed in his early morning cold bath in the cave. After his bath he first covers his privates, then puts on his skullcap, then his inner talles, then his pants and the rest. That order reveals his total commitment to religious propriety.  

He seems to have invested his emotions entirely into his religion and its political extension, to the point of violent radicalism. This fires his rejection of his daughter’s sexual identity. Because his religious and political extremism has overridden his human values, Joshua rejects his daughter’s lesbianism and independence. 
     He also expels her lover, Yael, the troubled teenager he brought into the community for therapy. She has been cutting herself, for the pain that briefly penetrates her emotional numbness. Joshua punishes both girls for their love, the girl recovering from emotional detachment and his daughter’s awakening.