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. 

Budapest Noir

“It’s Budapest, Ziggy.” 

No, that line is not spoken here but it could’ve been. The echo, of course, of Polanski’s Chinatown. Hungarian expat Eva Gardos brilliantly exercises the classic Hollywood film noir — but she sets it in 1936 Budapest. 

Normally the noir genre expresses America’s postwar resignation, despair, cynicism, the nightmares of the political upheavals shadowed further by the cellars explored by the new psychology. It valourizes the fatalist isolation of the truth-seeking hero who is alone afflicted with terminal ethics. Taint contagious.

By setting her revival of the genre in Hungary just before it submitted to the Nazis, Gardos reclaims the American genre as equally applicable to, perhaps even deriving from, the European culture. That did provide the genre’s base in Existentialism as well as the harrowing revelations of WW II. 

The film may gain another element from her eye on America in its current chaos, abandonment of its traditional character and its corruption. She may suggest that Europe may now have to become what America has ceased to be. As Angela Merkel observed, Europe can’t count on America anymore. So it has to slip itself into the philosophic, cultural and political structures America has vacated. So Gardos claims for Europe one of America’s most iconic genres.

Crime reporter Szigmund goes through the usual noir routine of working alone, bucking his boss’s orders and some police charges, getting beaten up a few times, spurning some women, enjoying others but losing the one that counts. Down those garish mean night streets the man must walk alone. 

The quest takes the hero across the social spectrum. He confronts the government as well as street thugs. He visits boxing matches, first in a posh nightclub where both men and women fight each other, then in a lower scale alley venue. He traces his corpse back to a high-class brothel, aptly called Les fleurs de mal, where the pros lure their beaux into their lair. 

By the way, Szigmund also cracks as wise as the hardest boiled US dick. He and his sharp blonde photographer love could match Nick and Nora. 

Szigmund is determined to do whatever good he can, however small. He offers a coin to the hungry little daughter of the thug who just beat him up (and turns out to have killed the woman). Our hero’s good deed only exposes the wider evil in that world: “I’m too young to do that,” the baby-toothed girl explains, rejecting the coin. The kid’s knowing and resignation are more chilling than her action would have been.

Szigmund has an in with current police chief because he helped expose the corruption of his predecessor. That collaboration — and the chief’s honesty — now pass their shelf-life expiry date.

By solving the mystery of a Jewish prostitute’s death he shines a brief light into the darkness about to break on the age. The plot pivots on the personal and global tragedy that grew out of Europe’s antisemitism. 

The exact time is significant. The historic Hungarian prime minister Gyula Gombas, a latent Fascist, has just died and is being given an all-consuming state funeral. The death of an apparent whore would normally slip by unnoticed — except this one briefly connected with our hero and he won’t let her death pass unmarked. 

The personal resolution opens into the international. The solution of the mystery is rooted in the antisemitism of the time. The girl left home because her father wouldn’t let her marry her true love, a rabbi’s son. That put her on the streets, then the brothel. 

But her father had his reasons. He knew the looming terror and the abiding danger, of being Jewish. Indeed his fortune and prospects for dealing with Nazi Germany hinge on this own conversion from the faith. 

The persecution of the Jews then — and some would add, arguably now — only led to the wider assault on other ethnicities, minorities, religions, and human rights in general. The assault goes beyond the Jewish woman and her father’s death. Szigmund’s photographer and lover Krisztina has just had to flee someone who objected to her photograph of the Jews assailed in Berlin: “His name was Adolph and he had a little moustache under his nose.” In resistance, she’s taking her work for an exhibition in London. 

In the last scene Szigmund’s smokes-seller tells him he’s closing his stand. He’s a one-armed veteran of the last war, struggling to survive, too honest for politics, but he’s a Jew. For that reason someone just threw a brick through his window. He has to leave.

Szigmund tries to reassure him. After all, the reporter may know his crime world, his own conscience, the country’s politics, perhaps even the noir conventions about to erupt in American cinemas. But he doesn’t know the storm about to sweep from Berlin across Europe.  
     So he tries to assure his frightened Jewish friend: “It’s Budapest.”
     That’s where I came in.

The Rider

Remember when America was the light unto nations? Then its independence, principled individualism and the ethical core of the civilization it brought to the frontier all made The Cowboy its natural icon. America was The Cowboy. 

Sometimes it was the world’s sheriff — like Will Kane. Sometimes — like Shane — he was the outlaw breaking from the community — at best, to serve it. 

But the Cowboy American was always the self-reliant man of principle, truth and honour. He lived and died by the code. He was also at one with his natural world of healthy, sprawling space, wild tameable horses and bursting dawns. He would build for his, his community’s and his nation’s dream of the future. 

As the times and America changed, so did the Western film. The genre was inflected to reflect the nation’s changing identity — the sweep westward, the building of the railroad, the conquest of the wild, the towns burgeoning into the modern urban, the outside wars, the McCarthyist suspension of American values, their recovery in the revolt against racism, Kennedy’s New Frontier. 
     The genre even accommodated the anti-hero spin of the ‘70s, and ultimately the newer frontier of space, when Star Wars grows out of The Searchers. The Western was the genre for all ages.  

Understandably, then, when a woman director born in China turns to make a contemporary American western she addresses the dominant current in contemporary America. 

The story of a broken cowboy — deprived of the macho career on which he based his life and self-worth — reflects a broken America, crippled by its self-destructive and obsolete principles of “manliness.” Any smack of a swagger seems delusional.  

In its clarity, humanity and realism this film stands alone in current American cinema. The cast has no actors. From hero Brady, his real father and sister, through his friends and rodeo colleagues, down to the even more broken ex-rodeo star Lane Scott, the performers are living or reliving their lives, not playing roles. 

If it’s sometimes painful to witness such honesty, it’s all the more moving and exhilarating. The dialogue doesn’t feel scripted. The lighting is natural. The events unfold with constant twists and surprises — like life. There are no formulae here. Whenever we think we know what’ll happen — a miracle cure, a new career training horses, a return to the rodeo, whether heroic or fatal — the story squirts away. Like life.

The actors playing themselves here ring truer than Clint Eastwood’s experiment with the real heroes in The 15:17 to Paris. That plot seemed cut to ennoble them. Not here. Mainly, though, none of Eastwood’s performers caught the sense of interior life, that the Jandreau family and Lane Scott reveal here. Eastwood’s gave their lines and went through the motions.  Thanks to director Chloe Zhao these characters are feeling and thinking anew, intensely.

The sister Lily is especially important. The mother dead, Lily is the only woman in the macho family. She has the purity and innocence of her name. A young girl with functional Asperger’s, she’s like a mustang in the family. Her words, mind and gestures are wild and unpredictable, but they careen into truth, as her whimsical singing does into beauty. 

Protecting Lily is an unspoken motive for Brady to keep on living, after his life’s passion and purpose are gone. He can’t put himself down like his broken horse Apollo. In his first clear sign of understanding his son, Brady’s father brings Lily to the rodeo where Brady is intent upon a possibly fatal ride. 

  Some key scenes reach poetic intensity. Brady breaks one horse with quiet delicacy, then a wilder one with a hard aggressiveness. In both cases he shows the sensitivity to realize what the horse needs. He adjusts to his partner. As it happens, the wilder horse is doomed from an unseen battle with a barbed wire fence. 

In contrast, the once wild Lane Scott is now completely crippled and helpless but he has the spirit to carry on. He has developed a digital system of “talking” to Brady. They watch Lane’s old rodeo success videos with more relish for what he was then than feeling reduced by what he is now. Brady takes Lane through rehab parodies of riding, which proves as useful a rehab for Brady as for Lane. He finds another reason to live.

The broken Lane delivers the film’s most resonant, but ambivalent, line:“Don’t give up on your dream.” Sounds good. But coming from a helpless, crippled man, that’s hardly good advice. 

That lesson may seem constructive but it’s not. Lane’s watching his old videos is not pursuing his dream but re-viewing the dream that died. Remembering the dashed dream may provide some consolation, but he can’t “pursue” it any more. 

Perhaps this is Zhao’s key message to her adopted America: Don’t be seduced into pursuing an impossible dream, a dream unrelated to reality. Pursuing his dream would take Brady on ride after ride till he’s killed. 

Instead, perhaps, pursue your dream as long as you can, but adapt to reality.  Brady fulfills his life not by pursuing his childhood rodeo dream but by accepting the adult responsibilities of staying alive and helping Lily and Lane. 

For America, that lesson translates to developing an awareness of one’s self and one’s situation, within its borders and beyond. Adjust the dream to reality and steer clear of the snake oil salesmen and cons who play on your vanity and offer to recover a past that you either can’t or shouldn’t. 

The “American Dream” — the promise that anyone can become anything they want in America — was never a guarantee. With that pitch, a con plunged the nation into its current nightmare. 

There’s another tacit lesson in the circle of Brady’s rodeo friends. Nothing is made of this, but it’s clearly there. His friends are a comfortable mix of indigenous Americans, Latino, Mexican. That’s the classic melting pot — that’s really what made America great. 

Indeed, the America based on human rights, freedom, equality and democratic values and government, that dream — currently suspended — is worth pursuing anew. 

. 

Insyriated

We need the power of art to help us imagine the unimaginable. Here Belgian director Philippe Van Leeuw plunges us into the hell of Syrians clinging together in the ruins of a Damascus apartment building, under constant threat of annihilation.

The door is bolted shut with two heavy cross-beams. But they can’t keep out the horrors. Any knock could be an enemy. These people are in harrowing vulnerability.  

At the core is a family: the indomitable Mother Courage Oum, her young son and two daughters, her father-in-law, and her maid. 

They have temporarily taken in a young male cousin and the young couple from the ruined apartment upstairs, Samir, his wife Halima and their infant son. In the absence of her husband Monzer, Oum runs the show. Her courage, sensitivity and will make her the embodiment of what Syria — if any — might ever survive. The Syria of the people, that is, not of Assad.

The film’s effect is to reveal how horrible the costs that politics can wreak on a people. The film is shot intensely, with a handheld camera, covering the events of one day, with a tense throb of strings in the score. We feel the tension of the characters under siege. 

We don’t know the politics of anyone here, not the besieged, not the snipers, not the rapists, not the helpers. But when a people are subjected to this kind of suffering, a city and a culture condemned to such ruination, issues be hanged. Nothing can justify such an assault. 

We share the characters’ shocks. We expect to follow Samir and Halima in their flight to Beirut, so are severely jolted when he’s immediately shot down in the parking lot. 

Oum calls Halima courageous, but warns her that she will become more courageous still. This the rape scene bears out, when Halima sacrifices herself to save the others. She suspects Oum set her up as a decoy. That doesn’t seem plausible, given how protective Oum has been toward her, but the suspicion typifies the distrust a civil war breeds even in such a close community.

Oum’s daughters grow up during this day. The older warms towards her cousin as he realizes a bravery even he didn’t know he had. The younger daughter seems thoughtlessly selfish, squandering valuable water to wash her hair. But she realizes an astonishing moment of maturity when she begs Halima’s forgiveness for wanting her to suffer in her stead. 

The film closes eloquently on the grandfather’s profile. He has seen too much, lost too much, learned too much, so he sits there stolidly, staring out on the violent ruins about. Like a pulse he measures out his life in cigarette puffs, sending smoke out to the ruins. 

His face is blank so it doesn’t say anything — yet says everything. We read into it all the emotions we have found in our glimpse into his crumbling life. Despite his helplessness, age and rotting guts, he maintains his dignity and his doting love for his grandson. But we see a tear gathering in one eye. 

My Mother's Lost Children

The director’s mother narrowly survived the Holocaust only to suffer another tragedy when her husband stole their first two children. 

The naive young Brit Lillian was seduced by the smooth, shallow Iranian Jew Raymond, who absconded with their child Andrew and infant Michelle. Over their 40-year separation neither mother nor child can overcome the void and pain their separation has caused them. 

Director Danny is Lillie’s son by her second marriage. His quest to find his half-siblings uncovers a maze of broken marriages, mothers and children. The men not so much. Lillie’s brother Manny still feels justified in not sharing with Lillian the letter informing her of Michelle’s quest to find her. Danny’s sister remains scarred by her mother’s emotional paralysis.

We look for whom to blame. Lillian may initially seem responsible because she made no effort to find the children. She entrusted the theft to the local Jewish Community Board instead of the police. She assumed Raymond had swept them off to Iran, out of her reach. In fact they were in a boarding school an hour away from her. Even when she met him to complete their divorce, she did not press to see her children again. She early resigned herself to their permanent loss.

But the true villain is Raymond. More generally, the problem is the power vested in the patriarchal family head. Male authority overrides humanity. Lillian’s immediate resignation was not just her own lack of will or spirit but her submission to the husband’s authority. 

Raymond’s second wife Amanda may have served the maternal role for the kids, but she too could not stand up to him. When he hits Michelle for her wanting to go to university in America, Amanda can’t intercede. So Michelle flees by herself, pained to lose another loving mother who couldn’t stand up to her man.

Raymond attempted the same theft with his two children by mistress Rosetta, but she fought him off with a knife. The woman outside the domestic system has the courage those in it lacked. The mothers needed the mistress’s courage.

Danny’s long-distance interview exposes Raymond as emptily righteous, arrogant, proud of his womanizing, unwilling to accept a father’s responsibility. He gave Andrew no help for his expensive cancer treatments. His last remark on Lillie confirms his callousness: “Tell her she was not a bad girl.” As he says, we can't redo the past. But a mensch would try to make amends.

  The family disruptions extend into another generation still. We don’t see or hear anything about the husband who left Michelle in her California estate. Her son lost his son to his absconding wife. Andrew’s daughter cut him out of her life after his divorce. The separations of the father are visited upon the children. 

One scene locates this family drama against its political background: the Iranian Revolution that implanted the harsh Ayatollahs. They are the theocratic, state version of the tyrannical father that ruined this film’s families. 

Maktub

For all its echoes of Pulp Fiction and In Bruges, this romantic comedy about two goons converting to goodness is distinctly Israeli. Perhaps only in Israel can virtue and self-realization be planted in the pragmatism of well-meaning deception and cons. Having pretended goodness to perform their evil, our improbable heroes now play dishonesties to do good. 

Steve and Chuma start out as a Good Thug/Bad Thug team of collectors for a boss that extorts protection money. They collaborate smoothly, though constantly bickering over matters like Steve’s new shirt’s stain — blood or pomegranate concentrate?

When they miraculously survive a terrorist bombing in Jerusalem Chuma takes that to be the first of a series of “signs,” messages and directions from the beyond. So a jackass walks by at mention of their boss and Chuma tells himself that one white car will be followed by five more. There is order in the apparent chaos of our life. 

Other signs fall from above, like a dead fish and a marble-like false eye. These apparent miracles have logical foundation. Steve pretends to another such an influence after he snips his abandoned son’s hair to get a DNA test sample, then looks skyward to explain the motion.

  They decide the signs direct them to quit the criminal business. They steal the boss’s last payoffs and plan to start a fish kebab food truck in New York. 

But first those heavenly signs prompt them to do some good deeds. For leads they steal prayer notes left in the Wailing Wall. Our cons set out to do God’s work on earth, by intercepting prayers and fulfilling them. Their beneficiaries consider them angels. 

To preserve the purity of their intentions, both spurn intimacies offered by the women they’ve helped. 

  Chuma has been doing that already, with his paternal generosity to the wife and son Steve abandoned (suspecting his illegitimacy). Chuma says he’s conveying Steve’s gifts but he is acting from his own heart and conscience.

  The cons agree the wishes must be granted literally, completely. That draws on the Jewish faith in the power of the word and moral commitment to “the word” in any pledge. (The theme impels The Merchant of Venice). When they’re helping the woman who prayed to get pregnant, we expect it might involve one of them in a carnal intervention. But no. Respecting the purity of her prayer they run her “miracle” through her husband. 

She is the third woman from whom our heroes abstain — and she saves their lives. The plots interconnect with such an ironic twist that our heroes’ actions and fate could tempt some of us to believe in divine intervention.  

But God is absent from this comic noir. A few Orthodox Jews stud the backdrop and the Wailing Wall figures prominently, but of synagogues, sermons and other religious rites there is nothing. 

  Instead, there is the numbing effect of having lost one’s father. Absent the Father, there is also the absence of the father. On both scales man must live by dealing with the sense of abandonment. 

Steve and his sister were abandoned by their father, so Steve flees the responsibility of being one himself, especially when he has the excuse of having been found sterile. When he declines his helped woman’s offer of a relationship she understands: “I know the sad eyes of a boy who doesn’t have a father.” 

  Steve’s son prays his unknown father will attend his football trip, then that his loving Chuma would be his dad. Spoiler alert: he gets both.  

Our heroes’ lives are saved by another miraculous conception, another assumed sterility overruled by a benefit of nature (aka God). And "Maktub"? That's Arabic for "it is written." It's about the Word and more: Man making God and goodness happen on earth. And it's often the unlikeliest.

The Cousin

Chabrol has already used the Cousins title so Israeli writer/director Tzahi Grad has the singular here. 
     But the film anatomizes both cousin races that grew out of Abraham, Hagar’s Arab and Sarah’s Jew, here Fahed and Naftali respectively. This is not about just the Palestinian’s suspect virtue but equally about the Jew’s. Each cousin has the Other to suffer the differences of and to reaccept as connected.

Naftali and wife Yael are liberal Jewish professionals. He’s made an animated film promoting biracial understanding and proposes a prime time TV series in which Palestinian-Jewish discussion might lead to better understanding and — oh, if only —peace.

Fahed is a rap singer as well a renovator, and proves a dab hand at computers too. His very range of skills makes him suspect, though, especially when his electrical error causes a frightening blackout. His dutifully anti-Israel lyrics don’t strengthen his case.

This Israeli and this Arab are as likely to get along as any. But the realities of Israeli life don’t make that easy. 

The scene where Naftali tries to pick up the Arab laborer he has booked bristles with deception and suspicion. One gets into the car claiming to be who he’s not. He swears at Naftali when he’s ordered out. The right man gets in, but he’s not quite right either.  He’s not the Sayeed that Naftali booked — who’s with his hospitalized wife — but his brother and coworker Fahed. 

When a girl is assaulted nearby, suspicion immediately falls on the Arab laborer. Despite Naftali’s skepticism, the charge gathers its own momentum. Fahed has to keep explaining himself, but suspicions grow. He never does produce the note he claimed to have left Naftali. He pops up and he disappears unsettlingly.

At first Naftali is confident enough to stand the suspect’s bail, to protect him from the inquisitive neighbours, and even to ward off wife Yael’s growing fear and anger at the possibly dangerous stranger’s intrusion into her home. 

But Naftali’s confidence weakens under Fahed’s innocent/suspicious behaviour, the neighborhood lynch mob’s invasion and the injured Yael’s decision to leave him. Grad develops the suspicions so carefully that we grow as uncertain as Naftali. 

But liberal values ultimately triumph. Naftali grabs a pistol to stop the assault on Fahed. He also draws out the girl’s unwilling identification of her assailant. Yael realizes her impractically idealistic husband was right all along, even heroic, so she takes him back.

  That sentimental conclusion is short-lived. In that charged situation even consequences have consequences. 

  The police arrest Naftali for injuring his wife, despite her denials, and for his liberties with the Jewish merchant’s loudspeaker and the soldier’s pistol. No good deed goes unpunished. Of course, Fahed disappears in the melee yet again. 
     The last shot turns the conclusion Absurd. A dramatic god’s-eye-view catches the scampering people in their frenzy of confusion, arrest, evasion, recapture, shrinking them to ants and their passions to trivia. The tensions and suspicions that loomed so large through the plot here disappear. This high-angle shot implicitly concludes: “What fools these mortals be.”
      Here's a parting irony: Naftali's TV proposal is rejected because it's assumed nobody will want to watch a weekly discussion between a Jew and a Palestinian, as they negotiate an understanding. But this film is itself the kind of thing they might watch, a gripping narrative in which both Jew and Arab fall under suspicion on the way to an embracing truth. A responsible fiction can be more constructive than a reasserted conviction.