Boreg (Self-made)

  Israeli director Shira Geffen interweaves the alienation of two women, a famous Israeli avant-garde artist and a beleaguered Palestinian labourer. Both move through life detached, stymied by the world around them. 

        She initially connects them with a missing screw. Indeed. the Israeli title means "screw loose." Artist Michal loses one while trying to put together a new Ikea-style bed. (The company name Itaka suggests  'ethics'). After her raging complaint, Nadine is unjustly fired for apparently having failed to bag the correct number of screws. She drops screws on her path to help her find her way home. That’s her prosaic version of Michal’s exploratory installation, performance and video art.

When the women cross paths— at a checkpoint, of course, where their cultures collide — they assume each other’s lives. Complicating that variation on the Prince and the Pauper story, the women look nothing like each other. Yet everyone accepts them in their new role. 

From that we can infer the general insensitivity to women’s character, needs, desires, the failure either to sense or to accept individuation. Palestinian, Israeli — for women bearing the next generation of enemies the distinctions are irrelevant. So, too, Michal’s husband — away on a tech conference — looks like the neighbour Nadine is having a furtive affair with. The Israeli soldier’s lover in the last scene could pass for Arab. Alternatively, the individuating traits we see are irrelevant to the issues of humanity in that conflicted climate. 

In one key shot the women meet on opposing escalators in the furniture store. But the shot has them moving sideways, laterally, as if to deny the characters’ vertical stratification. Neither rises, descends, or moves to progress. In the opening scene Michal lies in silence across the screen before falling out of bed, bruising her head. Her horizontality confirms her passivity, whether earlier as a very successful but politically ineffectual artist, or now in her amnesia.  

Perhaps the film’s key metaphor is the musical chef’s note that crabs wear their skeletons on the outside. That’s why he plays violin music to soften them for Michal’s romantic anniversary dinner (that her husband will miss). When the violinist has an organism from his own music he points to the onanistic nature of Michal's abstruse art. Michal’s exhibition is titled “Rolling the Insides Out.” Her new Biennale piece features the womb she has had removed, an artistic realization of her resolve not to have children.  "I don't want children" she screams on the phone to the furniture store manager, "I want a bed." 

        In contrast to the self-revealing Michal, Nadine lives a simpler, more prosaic manner. But her taciturn solidity and sexual initiative suggests she has a more solid character. She nurtures a private inner life that sustains her through her personal and job issues.

         Suggesting a marriage tension, Michal's husband has an additional problem, which is related to the society's reduction of women. His computer has been overrun with graphic pornography. The techie hired to purge it advises Michal to warn her husband against inviting it. In one compelling shot, Michal can't give her father a screen kiss because his face has been reduced to a small square on the porn woman's vagina. That is a perverse parody of birthing.   

The heroines' exchange of roles is heavily symbolic. Initially Michal has literally forgotten who she is. Nadine continues Michal’s catatonic remove from her interview with a German TV crew. When the German cameraman provokes her violence he exposes his own, gloating that the supposed Israeli peacenik is violent herself. His self-projecting allegation of violence is directed against the Israeli but could also apply to the Palestinian. Nadine’s pregnancy turns functional the profusion of nursery furniture the store has dumped on Michal. 

Completing the switch, Michal is equipped with the suicidal bomb assigned Nadine. We don’t know whether she will achieve that end or not. The fatal mission is at least delayed when Nadine’s neighbour’s younger son pauses to buy roses — for his mother. On the stone wall Michal passes her painting of large yellow flowers, the hopeful emblem of art reviving a hardened obstructive nature. Small flowers adorn both women's dresses as they cross their lateral paths in the store. 

The English title is pointedly ambiguous. The store deals in furniture their customers will put together — make — themselves. But as both women try to find coherence in their fragmented, numbing lives, they are fumblingly trying to find their own integrity, wholeness, being. They are as boxed a bunch of pieces as the eruption of Itaka cartons brings.

This region's political drama is usually played out in films by the men. Warriors play their war. Ms Geffen instead opts for a richly, ambiguously poetic vision that disables precise literalism. It is as moving as it is evocative.  

        There are a couple of personal notes. The director's actor husband plays the delivery man who asks if Michal needs help putting the furniture together -- then leaves before she can reply. Later the young soldier's leave cancellation means she must miss a concert by the director's singer brother. Geffen's art assumes a public platform and subject more committed than Michal's art scene, which is sharply satirized.

Pretend It's a City -- Episodes 1, 2

The wit of a maverick woman comedian may seem an unlikely subject for film director Martin Scorsese. The educated Association Test would rather come up with “the Mafia,” “urban violence,” “macho macho miserables,” than a very literate woman comic.

But that’s where Fran Lebowitz comes in. Both in her abandoned writing career and in her current standup/sitdown comedy performances she strikes a fighter’s pose to battle against the absurdities and dangers of contemporary city life. Especially NYC.

For there is violence in civilized behaviour as well as in Scorses’s mean streets, alleys and boxing rings. Indeed that is what drew him to film Edith Wharton’s Age of Innocence — the privileged woman’s novel that he and Lebowitz discuss briefly in Episode 2. While Lebowitz is front, center and the dominant presence of the film, the auteur is Scorsese. In his selection of the material and — especially — his arrangement of it, this is as much a Scorsese film as Taxi Driver is. It's just that Fran Lebowitz is no Travis Bickle.

Episode 1

“Pretend it’s a city,” Lebowitz declares and the phrase sticks as the series title. 

We know NYC is a city so what’s there to ‘pretend’? Well, it’s supposed to be a city but is it? Beyond the streets and population figures, is it really a city? Or is it an arena for thoughtless, uncivilized, dangerous, insensitive mis-conduct. The urban behaviour Lebowitz satirizes here points to the latter.

“Speaking of people in the street,” does it bother you that…” an audience member starts to ask. “Yes,” snaps Fran. People in the street do bother her. They are unthinking, self-absorbed, confident in their own invulnerability and completely careless about others. A city should be a community, not a collision of insensitive atoms. Absent that, we can only pretend it’s a city. Only once we acknowledge our mutual responsibilities will we have the community the true city connotes. 

Scorsese’s setting for the comedian’s riffs is telling. From the street symphonic beginning to the big bluesy end — and in between — the music romanticizes The Big Apple. This is the mythic New York of popular lore. The satirist’s reality will play against that.Scorsese, remember, also directed that musical drama New York, New York.

Fran’s routines, whether onstage or in interview, are intercut with two series of shots of her moving through the streets. In one: with Scorsese and the photographer unseen, she strides alone — a solid dark-cloaked figure cutting through the heedless crowds. The other is a dramatic contrast: she towers over a miniature model of the sprawling metropolis. It’s a brilliant visual representation of her perception — detached from the street scene, towering over it, rendering physical the moral detachment and judging the artist will bring to bear.  

“Do you tend to look down on people?” Scorsese asks. Of course she does, when she finds them failing in humanity. When they disagree with her. She is enraged that she has no power to change them. “The only person in the city looking where she’s going is me.” A  young man steering his bicycle with his elbows while texting on his phone and eating a pizza almost hits her in a crosswalk. She is continually besieged by tourists asking direction, obstructing her movement, engrossed in their cellphones, maddeningly selfish. Someone smashed her windshield to steal an apple and a 50-cent pack of cigarettes — and she accepts blame for the temptation.  Responsibility is what’s pretended to in this city.

Lebowitz exults in being out of step. Hence her advice to Robert Stigwood: “A musical about Eva Peron? Don’t do it!” He did it — and earned “a million a minute.” Meanwhile, buildings like the Mercer Center simply collapse into dust by their neglect.

The city remains a challenge. Nothing is permanent there, not even the $40-million concrete couches the mayor ordered for Times Square. Nor all the benches, planters, trinkets, that make the city “look like my grandmother’s apartment.” This heavy whimsey is another way New York City fails itself. So, too, it’s expensiveness: “No-one can afford to live in New York. Yet 80 million do? How? We don’t know." But move there anyway. “You will do enough things to live here.” And even better: “You’ll have contempt for the people who don’t have the guts to do it.”  

Episode 2

Here’s another way Scorsese finds Lebowitz’s wit sympatico.  Her moral satire is firmly in the tradition of Jewish comedy. And in America — Italian, Jewish, what’s the difference? Both are minority culture communities, tightly bound within but firmly Outside the society’s mainstream, indeed frozen in malicious stereotype. Jewish comedy derives from the feeling of being a fringe observer, excluded, indeed always endangered, but with the consequent privilege of being able to observe, discriminate and judge. That’s the satirist’s mission.

Lebowitz works in the tradition of Mel Brooks, Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, indeed drawing back to the noble profession of the Old Testament prophets, licensed to rail against the follies of their day. The Jewish spirit pervades her work here, less in specific jokes than in the marginalized wit’s moral indignation. 

There’s a rare Jewish joke in the second episode. Lebowitz gave up her passion for making art because “It was too pleasurable.” Life is not supposed to be pleasurable. That’s why Jews are forbidden bacon. 

This self-denial is central to Jewish comedy. First, it’s rooted in the Jewish history of persecution and danger, a life constantly at risk. Pleasures and confidence are to be reined in — dismissed with a spit — lest they bestir The Evil Eye. So, too, as a girl Fran was advised not to be funny around boys. Despite such restraint in her nurture, though, the compulsion of wit was sufficiently entrenched in her nature that it remains her — yes, career, but mainly her —  way to live.

The second episode focuses on the comedian’s practice of her Art. The opening joke pivots from the first episode’s focus on civility into considering the nature of art. The bigoted baker refuses to make a wedding cake for a gay couple because it would  violate his “art.” No, says Lebowitz, that’s not art; it’s “a snack.” She proceeds to consider the nature of art. 

So, too, the opening reverses the title: “It’s a city” then “Pretend.” Because we’re in a city, a community, we have to pretend, i.e., play, fictionalize, make art. Pretending is what the artist does, in whatever art. Of course, the primary pretence is that the work is just a fabrication, unreal, an escape from reality. But as the purveyors of fictions and constructions in the other arts know, it’s rather the realest real.  

Two scenes demonstrate this explicitly. In one Lebowitz rejects Spike Lee’s proposal that basketball star Michael Jordan ranks with Picasso as an artist. He may be in the pantheon as an athlete, she admits, but because his work is ephemeral, i.e., it cannot be accessed or repeated, he is equivalent to a dancer. Unlike music or theatre, in a game once we know the ending the grip is lost. 

In the second she notes that a Picasso painting is introduced to an auction house’s silence, but a hearty round of applause greets its sale for $160 million. The commodity outweighs the art. Instead of “Isn’t he good at painting?” we get “Aren’t you good at buying.”

As New York is enriched by its art and its liberty, it provides a refuge from provincialism: “What’s not here? Wherever you’re from.” A density of angry homosexuals is one sign of the city’s health. 

Toni Morrison says she writes so as not to be “stuck with life.” Lebowitz defines her profession as a writer as “making distinctions,” judging, i.e., exerting a social conscience. In the series of artists she shows here — Leonard Bernstein, Toni Morrison, Marvin Gaye, Charlie Mingus and Duke Ellington — the preponderance are African Americans, the historic -- and kindred -- underclass. Calder is in the cufflinks. Even Bernstein manages to “pass,” as his jazz symphonies connect with Ellington’s symphonic jazz. The Jewish Lebowitz typically connects to the African American artist.

Lebowitz’s stories about the tormented Mingus — whom her mother appreciated as “a good eater” — are a dramatic counterpoint to her exalting of music as the most satisfying art, musicians the most beloved, for expressing emotions and memories and providing happiness. “It’s like a drug that doesn’t kill you.” There is joy in the music, pain in the production. 

        Scorsese cites Wharton’s Age of Innocence not because he filmed it but because a school exam was criticized for citing its reference to the Countess having lost her looks. That might disturb schoolgirls, the silly Culture Canceller contended. But art is not intended to lull and to reassure -- and to delude. As Marvin Gaye declares, the artist is “only interested in waking up the minds of men” — the implicit audience including women, even girls. 

And So He Goes -- short story

  And so he goes

“I told you. The glasses go on that side. This row is for the cups. The small bowls go up the middle.”

“What’s the difference? They wash anyway.”

“That makes it easier to take them out.”

“If you say so.”

At 4:30 he said he was popping out to the deli for bagels. Poppy, for breakfast.

When he hadn’t returned by 10, when the National came on, she knew he was gone. She slept — unbroken — till 8.

“Look, she’s your mother. I wouldn’t expect you to go see mine every goddam day. Besides, she never liked me.”

“Okay, okay. I’ll pass on your regards. I may not be back in time to make you lunch, though, so fend.”

“I’ll go for dim sum.”  

At 4:30 he said he was popping out to the deli for bagels. Poppy, for breakfast.

When he hadn’t returned by 10, when the National came on, she knew he was gone. She slept — unbroken — till 8.

“You’ve set it for 74. That’s fine for you. For your office. But mine is sweltering. I can’t breathe. Why don’t we set it at 71 and you can wear a fleece.”

“But I’m so cold. Look, I’m shivering. It’s our big windows. Great view, but it lets out the heat.”

“So let’s compromise. 72, right?”

At 4:30 he said he was popping out to the deli for bagels. Poppy, for breakfast.

When he hadn’t returned by 10, when the National came on, she knew he was gone. She slept — unbroken — till 8.

“You put my Keith Haring socks in the dryer again. They’re shrinking.”

“Sorry. I forgot. Anyway, if you’d cut your toenails they’d last longer.”

“I’m not talking holes. It’s the shrinking. You never pull out my socks for the dryer.”

“I forgot. Maybe you might do your laundry sometime.”

At 4:30 he said he was popping out to the deli for bagels. Poppy, for breakfast.

When he hadn’t returned by 10, when the National came on, she knew he was gone. She slept — unbroken — till 8.

“I already sent them a donation. I did it online. Two hundred bucks. That’s enough for us.”

“Well, I didn’t know that. Anyway, they took the trouble to phone. I felt I had to give them something.”

“So long as they don’t expect that much next year.”

At 4:30 he said he was popping out to the deli for bagels. Poppy, for breakfast.

When he hadn’t returned by 10, when the National came on, she knew he was gone. She slept — unbroken — till 8.

“So if you don’t like my garlic sausage, my pickled herring, don’t the hell eat it.”

“I don’t. But the smell. I wish you’d just eat it when I’m not here.”

“So we’ll have separate meals. Fine.”

“That’s not the point. Besides, there are effects. I have to live with it. And you know that it gives you gas. The smell. I have to live with it.”

At 4:30 he said he was popping out to the deli for bagels. Poppy, for breakfast.

When he hadn’t returned by 10, when the National came on, she knew he was gone. She slept — unbroken — till 8. 

“Excuse me. It slipped out.”

“Jesus! That was loud! I almost dropped the plate.”

“I can’t help it.”

“Other people control their sneezes. I don’t know why you can’t. Look: I’m still shaking.”

“It’s the human condition.”

“Well, your condition anyway.”

At 4:30 he said he was popping out to the deli for bagels. Poppy, for breakfast.

When he hadn’t returned by 10, when the National came on, she knew he was gone. She slept — unbroken — till 8. 

“The lamb shoulder was on sale. Half off. Not previously frozen. Couldn’t resist.”

“But it’s so tough. And there’s so little meat on it. You want lamb, get a chop. A loin. I could make an osso bucco. Even meatballs. This is just bone and gristle. I’ll do what I can but remember — next time — the sale price isn’t everything.”

At 4:30 he said he was popping out to the deli for bagels. Poppy, for breakfast.

When he hadn’t returned by 10, when the National came on, she knew he was gone. She slept — unbroken — till 8. 

“It starts at 7. Let’s leave by 6:30.”

“But it’s 10, maybe 15, minutes from here.”

“You can’t trust the traffic. The bridge may be up. Better early than late.”

“But we don’t have to be there at the beginning anyway. There’ll be enough food.”

“I just don’t like being late. It’s disrespectful.”

“So you’d rather wait in the car for 10 minutes.”

“I respect other people. They said start at 7; we should make sure we’re there at 7.”

At 4:30 he said he was popping out to the deli for bagels. Poppy, for breakfast.

When he hadn’t returned by 10, when the National came on, she knew he was gone. “Like a long-legged fly upon the stream,” she mused, before drifting off. She slept — unbroken — till 8.