Crescendo

Israeli director Dror Zahavi’s new film uses a Romeo and Juliet plot to urge an escape from the Palestinian-Israeli deadlock. It’s a West Bank West Side Story but with classical (Western) music.

A German conductor is imported to try to pull Israeli and Palestinian youth musicians together for a concert. This notion has a real historic precedent — an initiative by Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said — but the film strikes out on its own by deploying the fatal romantic myth. If the historic project didn't break through the detente perhaps a classic tragic climax might,.

Both sides are depicted in their familiar intensities, sensitivities and aggressive insecurities. In the first crescendo, security issues set the musicians at war. So the group is whisked off to Switzerland. Ostensibly neutral during WW II, Switzerland here provides an idyllic escape, away from the contentious landscape, and the opportunity to develop a harmony out of the two warring cultures. 

But this war has no borders. A vehicular attack against the biking orchestra members reminds us that this ideological battle is waged beyond the borders in dispute, indeed across the globe. Both sides have international supporters. 

Even if the apparent attack was indeed just idle joyriders, the security force’s fears are nonetheless appropriate. The youth are counselled to be less forthcoming in their social media. 

The conductor’s strategy to unify his antagonistic players is interesting. His method is not to suppress or to ignore it but to let it all out. Then he has the enemies meet and mingle. This is to connect beyond their antagonism, not to remain stuck in it. As they make beautiful music together — by subordinating their egos to the art — the project threatens to be a success. 

Then an Israeli girl leads a Palestinian boy into a love affair. She has been outside the political debate and is naturally drawn to the shy, brilliant boy. His talent earns the conductor’s offer of a scholarship to study in Berlin, but his family needs him in their wedding band swill he go? The choice is denied him. 

The star-crossed lovers' brief affair is exposed when the girl’s belligerent girlfriend — who showed her privileged rage when she refused to accept that she failed her audition — vengefully publishes the photo of the couple in bed. That disastrous aubade leads to the girl’s family pulling her home, the orchestra's dispersal before  the concert,  the lovers’ flight and the boy being fatally hit by a car. Amid the musical harmony and the political fever, that accidental death confirms the absurdity of the continuing war. 
     The film salvages an upbeat conclusion. In their separate rooms at the airport, homebound, the Israelis’ problematic leader Ron starts a number and the others gradually join in. They give music the last word over their colleague’s death and the orchestra’s official failure. In Romeo and Juliet there is an effective authority. The Duke views the carnage and demands the families' feud end. There is no such authority in the Middle East.This film calls upon the rising generation to transcend the old animosity and work and play together, for a new harmony. That's the example set by the conductor, who transcended his Nazi parents' past.
     This is clearly a film from the Israeli Left. A director on the Right would have pivoted the plot on the death of Israeli innocents and required the step towards conciliation to come from the Palestinians. (After all, they're the side refusing peaceful coexistence, in real life). Here the onus is put on the Israelis and the victim is the Palestinian boy. The conclusion focuses on two Israeli egotists. The girl who rages against her rejection by the conductor later betrays her friend by exposing the affair. She's made the villain. In contrast, rebel Ron suppresses his selfishness and leads the group towards peace.
     The last musical number is appropriately Ravel’s Bolero. It begins with Ron's sinister tapping, as of a militant drum, threatening war. But it proceeds gradually and inexorably until it swells into a fully orchestrated harmony.  The movement from discord to harmony is the crescendo of the film's hope. The orchestra has been dispersed but the Israeli boy who had led the war now leads the musicians to honour the lost Palestinian lad. If only…. 

Leona

In his debut film director Isaac Cherem uses a young woman’s coming of age to probe the tension between insulation and assimilation in the Jewish community of Mexico City.  When Ariela dates a gentile man the Jewish community and her family assume the responsibility to stave off her possible loss to them. The mother deploys outside help to dissuade her daughter from her romantic purpose. Feeling shamed by her venture, both parents -- now separated -- and her grandmother banish her. This family pressure is buttressed by the community’s history and need for interdependence and renewal. The Mexican Jewish community's rigidity seems a throwback to the North American attitude,

Ariela is a talented mural painter. That is, she finds her self-expression on large outdoor spaces. Not for her the subdued, private paintings of easel and canvas. She wants to be out there. Committed to humanity, she fills the space with faces, amid elegant flourishes. That spirit enables her to take the gentile Ivan as a lover, though ultimately she can’t meet his demand to meet her family. 

Ivan is more respectful of her work than her Jewish lover is. Gabriel presumes she would rather slip into domesticity. But then, Ivan comes from an artistic family, Gabriel from merchants. Still, Ivan sleeps through his father’s production of King Lear and won’t attend his Romeo and Juliet, which would now be too personal. 

Ariela’s intervening suitors are even more inappropriate, Jewish but vulgarians. 

Honouring the community pressure, Gabriel courts Ariela’s family more than he does her. He clears their marriage with them before he asks her. All assume the collective will trumps the personal. At their first bedding, her upside-down view of his collection of National Football League memorabilia should have warned her off more completely. The NFL-nerd bowler wins her family but not her.   

She tries to recover Ivan by painting a mural of his tattoo — “Looking sensational.” But now he has a beautiful new girlfriend, Sofia, whom she meets at his friends’ engagement barbecue. 

The narrative is framed by two women's total nude immersions. The first is the mikvah, the formal Jewish ceremony in which her friend is ceremonially bathed in preparation for her wedding. While the friend proceeds into post-romance marriage pains and child-rearing, Ariela moves from her passion  — which isolates her from her family and the community — through the inapt Gabriel and the loss of Ivan, finally to resign herself to the solitude of independence. 

In the last shot she immerses herself in her tub alone, the solitary asocial alternative to the mikvah. Afloat on her own, like an island in the sea, she will make her own way, choose her own loves, define her own purification, rather than serve her community’s will and rituals.

     In that spirit she signs her new mural Leona, which is Spanish for the “lioness” her Hebrew name Ariela denotes. In name as in spirit, the lioness leaves the herd.