The Promised

A documentary on immigration — immigrants, what drives them out, what lures them in, what they realize — is especially timely these days. So there should be global interest in this study of three examples of French Jews driven to emigrate to Israel. How does the Promised Land live up to the promises they’ve assumed?

Of course, it’s a mixed bag. Moving to another country doesn’t help one to lose oneself, nor to find oneself. Wherever you go, as I’ve heard, there you are.

The overall situation is bleak: Increasing antisemitism across Europe, especially in France, makes Israel a desperate hope. Of course, radical Muslim terrorism in Israel attenuates the hope of escaping that in Europe. But at least one hopes for safety in one’s community. 

Marouane is the only instance here of primarily religious motivation, having recently decided to follow his Jewishness. He stands between a harsh reality — the pain of just having been circumcised at 18 — and the myth of Old Israel. He wants to be a shepherd in Jerusalem and live the old kibbutz socialist dream. But his move is impeded by his mental health issues so he stays behind, nourishing his dream. 

Isabelle gives up her Paris theatre career to follow her husband to Israel, leaving their teenage son behind. They also pay a professional price. He opens a pizza joint, she cleans for people, but for all their compromises they’re living his dream. Their experience begins with an infuriating disappointment: their rental apartment proves a wreck and they can’t get either their money back or legal satisfaction. Revelation: some Israeli Jews cheat Jews.    

Valerie is the long-settled Parisienne in Israel. The man who brought her dumped her when his job was done but she stayed. Now she’s a TV star interviewer — but she dances alone. As a gauge of her success, she interviews a dull minor celebrity who doesn’t remember — or understand — what he earlier said about antisemitism in France. 

All three stories are of disappointment. One didn’t get there, one got there with difficulty and the other has been there a while, has established herself, but even she pays a price for her uprooting to find her roots.
     The chorus we hear throughout is that Israel is beautiful, it is a miracle, it is the Jews’ refuge. That’s all true, as equally are the danger and disenchantment that shadow the dream.  

In the Land of Pomegranates

This long, uncompromising documentary demonstrates the intractability of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. 

At the heart of the film, a group of young adults from both sides convene in Germany for a retreat to hear each other’s case. The hope is they may reach some new understanding, some acceptance, some softening in the battle lines. The convenor is a Palestinian man who converted from hard-liner to hopeful. His hope continues in the face of no apparent reforms.

Both sides are passionate and articulate in making their case. The few signs of softening are on the Israeli side. The young Palestinians won’t abandon the Right of Return that would shatter the Jewish state. The Israelis live among conflicting viewpoints, the Palestine among their own reassertion.

  The discussion is intercut with three other lines of action. One is news footage of the violent eruption of terrorist attack and IDF harshness on duty. In another, a settler on the inner edge of the Green Line discusses her dreams of a secure life and the encroaching assault upon her home. 

Finally, a Palestinian mother leaves her family behind to bring her young son to Israel for a life-saving heart operation. To the Israeli doctor no-one in need of his help is an enemy. Spoiler alert: the kid survives. He returns a few years later with his father for a checkup. There’s a younger doctor, the patient is older and still resntful, but the violent environment persists.

If the latter subplot advantages the Israeli position, there is an unsettling coda. A couple of cute little Israeli children, possibly the Green Line woman's children, talk about surviving the tensions of a constant existential threat. But they feel safe because they are close enough to Gaza to hear the bombs but far enough away to feel safe.

  That is an illusory security. With their rockets and invasive tunnels Gaza remains a serious danger. Even more threatening would be converting the West Bank to another Gaza. Then no part of Israel would be safe from terrorist rockets and bombs. 
     This dramatic circumspect debate allows no sentimental or optimistic conclusion. For 85-year-old director Hava Kohav Beller has witnessed too many lapses to hold much hope. Credit her for this attempt to bridge the abyss. 
     The title is suggestive. I don’t remember any mention of a pomegranate in the film. But the fruit is an effective symbol. The pomme grande is “the great apple,” so it’s sometimes taken to be the apple in the Garden of Eden, representing the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Besides, when you bite into it it bleeds. That makes it almost human. 

In Her Footsetps

In this Arab Israeli documentary, a daughter films her mother’s last days before her death from cancer. The difficult times are complicated by the family’s various ethnic ties. Indeed the film’s subject is the tectonic shifts of tribalism within the one family.

The Bedouin father married the Arab mother. They fled his community in the night to preclude obstruction. She upset her family by marrying her choice, for love. Despite their long love, she still bristles against his Arab assumption of male authority.

The mother insisted on moving to an Israeli city, where their children could receive a Western, Israeli education. The filmmaker daughter thus grows up into Western values and responsibilities, but detached from her mother’s Arabic culture and even more remote from the Bedouin. She speaks Hebrew and English but no Arabic.

Those tensions come to a head over the mother’s burial. The Israeli town council won’t allow a non-Jewish burial in the city’s cemetery. The father finally submits to her insistence on burial among her people, instead of his. That incurs his shame of “dumping her” in her home town cemetery. 

  Their children are barred from their mother’s funeral. So instead of the funeral footage we get a replay of the parents’ marriage. Having seen the mother shrink at the end, we find her early beauty all the more heart-rending.

 The filmmaker followed her father's filmmaking interest, but the title defines her mother's shaping force.
In the last shot the father is a small isolated figure treading the vast empty dunes of his peoples’ life. Fulfilling their mother’s dreams, his children have departed to the outside world, a daughter back to New York, a son to alien Asia. If the daughters in their intellectual independence have followed in their mother’s footsteps, the bereft father returns alone to his own peoples’ wasteland. There the winds quickly erase his shallow steps. 

Between the “honour killing” of the father’s cousin and his daughters’ Westernizing and independence seem to stretch a few centuries. But the tribal exclusions and traditions survive into the contemporary. 

The mother is extraordinarily modern, to the point of welcoming her children’s true loves even if they were Jewish. Yet the town she’s lived in for 20 years won’t accept her burial.   
     As the film exposes this particular prejudice in the Israeli system, it should also be noted that this work was funded by the Israeli government. In the Middle East only Israel funds its critics. This is the artistic equivalent to the parliament, the Knesset, including  members dedicated to the destruction of the state they serve.  

Humor Me

In intercutting his narrative with black and white enactments of grim jokes, writer/director Sam Hoffman pulls an interesting feature film out of the material of his first work, the online TV series Old Jews Telling Jokes.  

The film centres on familiar family tensions — sibling rivalry, dealing with widowhood, growing old, the abyss between father and son, the smothering between mother and daughter. 

But it’s arguably most distinctive for its reflection on how comedy enables us to deal with life’s harshness, if at the risk of intimacy. As any tale-telling wag may realize, jokes can either connect us to or isolate ourselves from, other people. Indeed humour can also be a weapon, so "Humour me" can include "Hit me with some humour." The jokes run aptly black and blue.

Bob Kroll’s penchant for funny stories connects him to his buddies. They sit around swapping one-liners. 

Now, the film makes no explicit reference to anything Jewish here. But it’s still old Jews telling jokes. It’s Jewish humour typically providing an enabling spirit in the face of tragedy. 

Bob’s gag reflex has protected him from openly grieving his wife’s death, but at the cost of burying his emotions. He stashed her belongings in a a storage closet and his emotions behind his barrage of Zimmerman jokes. 

That comic reflex also prevented his emotional closeness to son Nate. Brother Randy has succeeded in life by glibly adapting (i.e., plagiarizing) his father’s real estate slogan. Nate is too serious and sensitive for that easy success. As the attack of digestion jokes encapsulates, Nate is blocked.

Hoffman plays out the stories as film events, life scenes separated only by colour from the narrative “life” action. He’s showing not just telling. That strategy gives comic storytelling the same heft and value as real life. Bob’s stories are as central to the film’s concerns as the plot is. The film is centrally about their interrelationship. 

So Nate’s growth is from disdaining his father’s comedic compulsion to making it work for him. He rescues the seniors' doomed Mikado production by interlacing the three girls’ song with bawdy jokes. There's even comic relief in the old woman's "having a stroke." Once he realizes his father’s emotional life continued behind the protective shell of jokes, Bob unblocks himself and rediscovers his creativity. 

Bob’s first play, the big and promising success, was based on his mother’s death. The new blocked play is a drama about how to react to the tragedy of the Pompeian corpses found frozen dead after a volcanic eruption. 

Great metaphor. The lava has frozen the humanity in dead postures, life arrested in a still where motion used to be. Bob has trouble scripting his characters’ reaction to that. He himself is frozen, blocked, buried, because he doesn’t know how to confront such a tragedy. Then he realizes his father’s way. Jokes. Only the energy of the comic burst frees him. 

It works. By converting the Gilbert and Sullivan to contemporary joking, Nate recovers his confidence, energy and spirit. He returns to finish his Pompey play. He has a new comfort with his father. He can stay independent of his dumped ex-wife and warmly introduce his young son to his new girlfriend. 

Life goes on. If you can find the right gags to lubricate it. And don't stop me if you've heard this one.

Heading Home: The Tale of Team Israel

This spirited, entertaining feel-good documentary follows the success of an Israeli baseball team — made up of American Jewish players — in an international tournament. Not so much David vs Goliath as Rocky One: survival proves as significant as victory.

The film’s primary theme is Identity. The Americans come from the whole spectrum of Jewishness, from Devoutly Practicing down to Married to One. Several qualify by their parents or grandparents. As one player observes, they qualify as Israeli players by the same terms Hitler qualified even non-practicing Jews to slaughter. 

  The players’ varied experience reveals a similar spectrum of antisemitism. In contrast, the media reports on the team’s unexpected success shows the American society’s embrace of the team, with a sense of adopted community and humour. 

Several players express the profundity of their emotional experience in Israel, whether in the spiritual aura of the Wailing Wall or in their confidence that Israel is the refuge to which Jews from all over the troubled globe can repair, if necessary. The title points to the double meaning, the runner hitting home to score and the diaspora Jew finding security in the homeland. 

      Because Israel is the Jewish state “Team Israel” legitimately comprises Americans, not  Israeli citizens. All Jews qualify for Israeli citizenship. A journalist raises the issue. The tournament’s Heritage regulation allows that; Spain too is made up of Spanish speakers not citizens. 

The Americans hope their example will generate Israeli baseball and a national team that won’t need Americans. A baseball is planted in symbolic parody of the trees that have been historically planted to turn the desert into a garden.  

  In that hope — and the planning of a baseball stadium named after a young terrorist victim — the game replays the state’s overall emergence into independence and self-reliance.

Another scene extends the identity theme beyond the Jews. The players visit a shop that sells Hebrew versions of US sports jerseys. The Arab owner jokes with the players and even tops them on some US baseball stats. Despite their bonhomie, though, he can’t even pretend that he will cheer for the Israel team. He can’t get a passport. He can’t feel himself an Israeli. 
     In the harder edged extension of that theme, a terrorist drives a truck through a Jerusalem crowd. This is the shadow that falls across even the feel-good stories that depict the remarkable growth, accomplishment and hopes of the Jewish state.   

The Antenna (2016)

An 80-year-old holocaust survivor Joshua’s traumatic memory affects his three grown sons.          As the English prof argues, literature has the responsibility to reach that terrible history, for its effects damage successive generations whether they know it or not. The narrative demonstrates his principle beyond even his awareness.

The antenna is a metaphor for the old man’s preternatural sensitivity to the remaining toxicity of his time. His neighbor has rented his roof for a cellular company’s antenna. Joshua blames the antenna’s radiation for all his pains and sleeplessness.

As it happens, the old man is proven right — but his sons don’t tell him, for fear of more violent response. However irrational Joshua’s fear, it costs him his leg anyway. Sometimes a paranoia proves right.

The military son shows his holocaust shadow in his absence from home, his heavy handed discipline of his sons and a general insensitivity that drives his wife into an idle tryst with his brother, then home to her mother. He’s punished for losing a gun. His oldest son rebels with tantrums at home and a violent attack in a classmate that gets him expelled. Kicking the principal didn’t help his cause.

  The prof is divorced and unproductive in his discipline, which costs him a promotion and leaves him vulnerable to a student’s seduction. When his young son insists on being carried out of school, his self-infantilizing shows a third generation of paralysis.

The deejay son deals in drugs and refuses to bring his pregnant German gentile girlfriend to meet his family. Fearing his father’s anger and pain, he claims his four years in Germany were in Amsterdam.
     The old man’s death — which results from the removal of his radiated leg — liberates his family. The soldier gets an easier posting, to his family’s benefit — and his wastrel brother finds the lost gun. The deejay finally takes responsibility for his pregnant girlfriend and brings her into his family. She is converting to Judaism to marry him.
     The prof breaks free from his father’s hunger for vengeance when he stops his own covert attack on the neighbor. He also abandons his delusory affair with his student. He realizes that her promising draft novel seduced him into using her to fill his void — an unreciprocated commitment.

Even the mother is at least freed from the rigorous demands her family placed on her and the harsh demands of her cantankerous, even violent and impatient patient.

     The film reminds us of the lasting damage, anger, fear, instability, that remain in the shadow of the Holocaust. It falls across the land still. 

Where's Poppa? (1970)

Carl Reiner’s film of Robert Klane’s black comic novel remains a cult classic. It deserves a wider audience.

The plot’s serious centre is the difficulty in properly caring for the aged. Successful Sidney (Ron Liebman) leaves schnook brother Gordon (George Segal) to look after their uncontrollable aged mother Mrs. Hocheiser (Ruth Gordon). Her genius for driving away caregivers incapacitates Gordon both at his law career and from realizing his new love-hope, the angelically sparkling and soft-focus Louise (Trish Van Devere). 

Gordon is so paralyzed by his father’s deathbed instruction that he can’t even utter the word when he considers putting his mother into a “ho…ho..ho….” When he finally squeezes out the full word, “home,” it’s as physical as the turd Louise’s first husband left on their honeymoon bed after their first love-making (“Doesn’t everyone?). 

Gordon rushes his mother to two homes, both “State Approved.” Gus and Grace’s proves a nightmare of elder care. The lone Gus (Paul Sorvino) manages only minimal service and concern. Gordon finally leaves her at a palatial rural estate, too idyllic to ring plausible.

Gordon completes the dream ending by carrying an old man over to his mother and presenting him as her lost husband. “Poppa?” “Momma?” Two hopeless delusions cohere for the happy ending. Make that three, counting our relief at the opulent placement.  

Mrs Hocheiser denies her husband’s death so the new assignment satisfies her. Behind the opening credits we see souvenirs, mementoes, army implements, tossed into an old trunk, emblematic of the missing father whose ghost shadows the film and propels his widow’s madness. We assume her new old man has persisted in a parallel fantasy.  

That human drama plays against a social landscape of broader insanity. The film reflects several lunacies of its time. The trials that the befuddled Gordon can’t focus on represent outrageous abuse in a society run amok. 

  In the first, the hippie (Rob Reiner, pre-Meathead) accused of cutting off a general’s toe is found in contempt of court for his profanity and anger. He’s all but justified by the general’s insane monologue of murderous racism. That catches the madness of the Viet Nam war and its protestors.

  In the second a mad football coach (Vincent Gardenia, puffing on a cigarette holder that augurs new health) is suing the team that fired him — for staffing it by kidnapping huge helpless children from the backwoods.  

  In this mad racism a taxi passes up on a black woman to pick up a gorilla (Sidney in costume). A woman dissolves when she thinks the panting man in a gorilla suit is masturbating beside her in the elevator. 

The madness extends to Sidney’s ostensibly normal family. His wife refuses to let him go help his brother — until Sidney threatens his mother will have to come stay with them. “Go. Now. Take a cab.” 

This home is as violent as Gordon’s. To get out Sidney threatens: "Get away from that door, or I'm gonna choke your child.” “He means it, Ma.” And again: “Let me out. I haven’t got time to beat up the kids.” 

Of course, in the first scene Gordon dons the new ape suit before waking up his mother in hopes of scaring her to death. But “Almost doesn’t count.” He suggests getting her a big dog after he fantasizes his mother shrinking to the point a dog eats her (“in one bite”). The dog raises a paw to be cuffed before being taken to the station to be booked. 

The only coherent social unit here is the gang that ritually robs Sidney every time he crosses Central Park. The slick swaggering leader extemporizes new scenarios. In the first he replays The Naked Prey requiring Sidney to shuck his clothes to escape his dread pursuer Motherfucker.  The next time, Sidney — as guest of honour at their gala party — is forced to lead off the gang rape. He’s arrested when the mini-skirted victim turns out to be an undercover male cop.

This leads to one of the decade’s richest shots. In the back of the cab Sidney — a cerebral lawyer animal in his gorilla suit — treasures the flowers and beams at the prospect of a new love. He asks Gordon if he should indeed follow up on the invitation. The roses and romance offset the ludicrous suit and the sordidness of the Park scene and the pervasive madness — without quite descending into sanity. Beside him sits the broken and despairing Gordon, who feels he has lost his one last shot at love. He has little patience for Sidney’s new bliss and his request for advice to the love-looming. 

When he first meets Louise her name sends Gordon into a long slow whispering recital of the eponymous love song. As it draws them together for a kiss, the song evokes the sonnet by which Romeo and Juliet first converse. Just meeting her has fired hope and love into Gordon's unrelievedly despondent condition. Only her plan to return to Waukegan (“Isn’t Jack Benny from there?”) inspires the courage for him to say “home” and put his mother into one. Love conquers all. 

Make that three romances. The Momma and the Poppa connected at the end provide a third relief in romantic delusion. Incidentally, the novel ended slightly differently: Gordon dumps his mother off at the Home but dry-humps her before leaving. (This alternative conclusion may be on the laser disc edition.) The scene recalls the Park mugger’s name, which may have been the first appearance of “motherfucker” in American mainstream cinema. Or not.

Finally, attention must be paid Mrs Hocheiser, in Ruth Gordon’s brilliant portrayal. Despite our sympathies for Gordon, she commands our sympathy and respect. The monster is a pathetic waif. Reduced to a one-room life with daytime TV, she touchingly shifts between perception and memory. She’s childlike in the difficulty of dressing her and in her breakfast, Lucky Charms drenched in Coca Cola, and an orange that MUST be cut into six pieces. When she dances and studies her looks she relives her lost beauty, that would return with her lost love Poppa. She’s plucky enough to punch the attacking gorilla in the nuts.

In her scenes with Louise she wavers between confusion and disturbing perception.  Rebelling against Gordon restricting her to mashed peas, she swipes something more solid from Louise’s plate. In an alarming perception she spots the couple holding hands. That prompts her major defence against abandonment. First her finger reveals the size of Gordon’s “little pecker.” Climactically, she pulls down Gordon’s pants: “I’d recognize Gordon’s tush anywhere.” The mother’s intimacy blocks out the fiancee. 

The film only incidentally touches on the eldercare issue. Its deeper drama derives from the minefield of parental control and its traumatic effects. That makes this film an even more comic partner to Hitchcock’s Psycho, but with the additional thread of contemporary social satire.