Souvenir

Subtlely, the incongruent last shot recasts the entire film we’ve just watched. With a swirl of flamboyant flare slacks, heroine Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) walks out through the monstrous steel doors of a sound stage. The landscape outside is the bush-punctuated horizon we saw earlier, over which Julie read the letters that marked the dissolution of her affair with Anthony (Tom Burke). 

The soundstage identifies the major feature film we’ve just been watching, not the film school student projects that have been interwoven with the Julie-Anthony relationship. Those were bitsy pieces including a scene from Measure for Measure.  That is, the film we’ve been watching is a film being made, a narrative being imagined/remembered, not the usual putative elapsing of a life’s events. This is meta-cinema.

Julie’s flashy pants and confident stride here quite depart from her timorous bearing through the narrative. Expanding her tentativeness, while the other characters worked off Joanna Hogg’s memoir script, Honor Swinton Byrne extemporized her lines, drawing on Hogg’s journals, scripts, photos and letters from the late ‘70s, when these events happened to her. She is creating her character on the fly. Hence this narrative feels largely unscripted. Author/director Hogg draws a two-feature narrative (the second half is in the works) out of her memories of student days and her first love affair. 

In another fiction/life continuum, the West Raynham Film School is named after the air base hangar where the sets were built and the film shot. 

So, too, the self-reflexive title. This Souvenir is a souvenir of another Souvenir, the 18th Century Fragonard painting of a lovelorn woman carving her absent/lost lover’s initials into a tree. This work intrigues Julie; Anthony sends her a postcard version. Our film is her record, her carving, of her lost lover’s name and their passion into the immortality of art, this time the film. 

In addition to being the director’s memoir, the film is a clear meditation on the function of art, especially film, especially in the cultural moment of its setting. The late ‘70s evokes the culture’s romantic revolution against traditional British torpor and stiffness. 

Both sets of parents —Anthony’s and Julie’s — embody the bloodlessness of the British upper middle class. Julie’s live in a luxurious estate and fund her posh London flat where a garish bedstead and doubled bed accommodate her first affair. Mother Rosalind (Honor’s mother Tilda Swinton) steadily “lends” Julie the money she needs to support Anthony, under the guise of funding her student film.  
      Anthony’s parents live on a more modest rural estate, appropriate for an undistinguished photographer whose interest in the Sunderland shipyards lies in the beautiful shapes of the ships not in the workers’ beleaguered lives. Only Anthony’s disintegration punctures the period’s pallid aestheticizing of suffering.     

As Julie’s film profs tell her, she should be drawing her art out of her life. Intending to escape her privileged Knightsbridge “bubble,” she plans to tell a grittier Sunderland story. She would focus on a little boy helplessly dependent upon his mother, terrified at losing her — and then she dies. Julie’s affair — that drives this film — lives out that plot or dynamic.  Julie becomes utterly dependent upon the initially iimpressive but doomed Anthony, who dies. Thus she lives the story that she initially intended only to tell. 

Paradoxically,  Julie must first assume the mother’s function, when she has to support the weak man. Anthony, implausibly claiming to work for the Foreign Office, then to have connections to the Courtauld, initially treats Julie to upper-class London dining but then proves financially dependent upon her — at the same excessively posh places. His financial dependency feeds her emotional dependency, until he dies, freeing her to make her/this movie.

Anthony’s black director friend provides another critique of the period cultural war. In his leopard skin costume and with his big-hair brassy blonde partner he is the liberated colonial. He disdains the film school teachers and appreciates the school only for the opportunity it gave him to steal what he needed to make his film.     
      Curiously, his set-piece argument is that Britain has never made a musical feature film. He reels off the contemporary hit groups — the Stones, the Kinks. etc. — but notably omits the Beatles. This omission points to the larger gap in his argument: Britain indeed did produce several musical features, ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s Waltzes from Vienna (1933), the George Formby vehicles, indeed the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Help! ((1965) and Yellow Submarine (1968), John Boorman’s  Catch Us If You Can, with the Dave Clark Five (1965), inter alia. The man's firm assertion is wrong, the expression of an ungrounded authority, a fraud in his film history as in his filmmaking.   
      Yet that man has an immediate insight into the Julie-Anthony relationship. He knows what she, for all their intimacy, doesn’t — that Anthony is a heroin addict — and he infers the lovers’ incompatibility.  But the chap is still wrong. Anthony may not be the right man for Julie’s love life. But he’s the right challenge to launch her artistry, giving her a personal engagement with the story she determined to tell. He breaks her bubble. 

Lebanon (2009)

As the 2009 Israeli film Lebanon reminds us, the best historic film finds a nugget of truth in its subject event that applies to the wider historical arc. It makes that moment in human history a reflection of a truth beyond itself. The incident itself becomes a metaphor of greater resonance. In Aristotle’s terms, that’s where a history achieves the validity of poetry. 

Wrier/director Samuel Moaz based the film on his own experience in the Lebanon war of 1982. He was the gunner in a four-man tank unit. As if his psychological wounds were not enough to work out through this project, lingering pieces of shrapnel fell out of his skin during the film-making. That’s not in the film.

Shot almost entirely within the overheated, suffocating, cramped, smelly and swampy tank, the film focuses exclusively on the visceral engagement in the war, not on any political issues. And yet….

The film is framed with shots of a brilliant field of blowing sunflowers. The first reads as an emblem of the garden that the Jews transformed the desert into when they planted the Jewish state in 1948. In the last the tank appears at the back of that field, bogged down, unable to move. The garden has become a quagmire.  Another Eden is being lost.
      But there's a shadow side to the sunflower emblem. From Van Gogh to John Bratby the sunflower has been an agent of brightness, joy, exuberance. But also -- as Simon Wiesenthal has observed -- the Nazis planted sunflowers on their soldiers' graves. The Jewish state is built on the defeat of the Jews' enemies. 

The Israeli tank soldiers are of course civilians. At first they exude an impressive efficiency and strength. But the stress takes its toll. One dies. The gunner freezes, unable to shoot, causing unnecessary deaths. The captain crumbles into paralysis. The irascible maverick holds together the best. 

As the tank lumbers into the ruins of a town on the first day of the 1982 invasion, it becomes a metaphor for the Jewish state, forced to constant military self-defence since its very inception. Though the tank is invading, its soldiers seem the real prisoners, encased in the attack, helpless to break out of its path, mission and fate.

The smashed town and the scattering of murdered and dismembered Lebanese citizens form half the film’s argument against the war. The other half is the militarism forced upon the Jewish state’s defenders. 

These Israelis show compassion to their enemies. One one soldier covers the naked Lebanese woman with a blanket, her clothes having born away ablaze. The Israelis refuse the Christian Falangist’s demand to be given over the Syrian prisoner for his sadistic abuse. The victims of the Sabra and Shatila massacre were not thus protected.

  One of the film’s most dramatic motifs is the shot of a numbed victim staring wide-eyed and accusing at the gunner. In the Israeli theatres that heart-rending stare was at the Israeli audience the gunner was defending. 

That battle is over and in history but that war goes on. Israel invaded to attack the PLO, but other animosities erupted as well, tensions that continue in Lebanon unabated. Indeed they percolate anew as Iran spurs Hezballah to wage its proxy war against Israel. 
       And there is Israel, perpetually besieged however powerful. Its every defensive move is assailed as aggression in the global agora. It’s still that impenetrable tank that can’t quite move out of the blossoming field that is the state’s miracle, that continues to need that defence. With tens of thousands of rockets aimed at Israeli civilians, Lebanon still threatens to return to battlefield.  

The Fortunate Man

This epic drama pivots on the single Danish word that means both “success” and “happiness.” Every stroke of titular hero Per’s good fortune endangers his happiness. His overweening selfishness is the tragic cost of his escape from his vicar father’s harsh religious austerity. In refusing his father’s demand for humility Per sinks into the opposite mire of arrogance. The strong will that enabled him to flee his father’s faith ultimately defeats his career and love.

While we sympathize with Per’s escape from a stifling religion into the freedom, challenge and responsibility of life as a Copenhagen engineer, we wince at his exploitation of the women he uses on his way up — and down. He shames and abandons the waitress who generously launched his career. He dumps the younger, lighter Salomon girl Nanny for her wealthier and — to be fair — far more substantial older one, Jakobe. He approaches women with the same willfulness he uses on projects: “You want me!” he insists, shorter on sensitivity than on force. 

When his huge engineering project collapses under his own intransigence, however, Per jettisons this great, true love Jakobe as well. He returns to the simplicity of the rural life he’d fled. For this he uses another woman, a vicar’s daughter, who bears him three children before he abandons her for the contentment of a recluse. He persists in a professional vanity that excludes providing for his family. 

Per’s admirable imagination and creativity in engineering posit an alternative to the social well-being that religion promises. He defeats his own project by arrogantly refusing to apologize to the government official upon whose approval the project and its funding depend. At the same time, that stubbornness threatens his relationship with the Salomons. 
     Blinded by his own vanity Per misses Jakobe’s hints that she is carrying his child. When she later launches her school for the poor she confirms that she and their marriage represented Per’s highest potential for the public as well as their private well-being. In their final meeting he reveals he is dying of cancer and bequeathing his meagre fortune to her school — instead of to his abandoned family. Pretending to a new clarity he reveals only another aspect of his blundering selfishness. Even this hermit is vain.

As a father Per catches himself as harsh toward his oldest son as his father was to him. His response is not to soften but to flee. This coheres with his flight from the great passion Jakobe offered. The “fortunate” man proves unable to accept and grow from any of his successes. 

The Salomon family’s Jewishness provides a broadening context to Per’s individual career. The Salomons are a wealthy, successful, highly respected family in the 19th Century Danish community. They raise no concerns when Per is invited into their home, then into their family. They value his intelligence and ideas and are eager to advance his cause.

Indeed the Salomons typify the security of so many Jewish families, integrated into their respective communities, dedicated to advancing their host nations, yet implicitly threatened by the bubbling antisemitism around them. “That Jewish whore,” a government official mutters under his breath when Jakobe comes to try to reconcile with Per’s cold brother. The YWCA rejects Jakobe’s help serving the needy children when they learns she’s Jewish. For all their hard-won good fortune, the Jewish family enjoys a contentment that history will soon disrupt. (Da Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi-Continis offers a pertinent parallel here.). In contrast, Per's destruction is completely due to his own arrogance.    
       As for the double meaning of the title: an earlier Danish film Gift meant both poison and marriage.

Caperrnaum

This my be the best political film I’ve ever seen. It’s Bunuel’s classic Los Olvidados (1950) on steroids. Of course, it’s not about politics. But its every fiber arouses fury at the political systems that enable such hell on earth.  

In Lebanon a 12-year-old Syrian refugee boy Zain is serving a five-year jail sentence for stabbing the adult man who married and fatally impregnated the boy’s 11-year-old sister. Their parents forced her into marriage. 

Now Zain is suing his parents for bringing him into a life in which they could not provide for or protect him. He’s prompted by his mother’s proud announcement that she’s pregnant again, adding to her innumerable horde of children, all unregistered, unfed, uneducated, the disdained doomed. 

The trial scenes are intercut with the events that led up to it. His father expels Zain for interfering with his sister being sold into marriage. The boy finds refuge with an illegal Somali refugee Rahil. He tends to her infant son Yonas while she works. When Rahil is arrested for her lapsed ID Zain struggles to care for Yonas. He’s ultimately forced to let a Lebanese trafficker sell the baby.    

For 126 minutes the film displays a gripping sweep of suffering. There is not a moment of drag or boredom. The cityscape looks like a giant warehouse crammed with storage boxes. This is a city with no visible humanity.  

     There is little evidence of any living creatures enjoying any life. The humans we meet are locked into either selfish or desperate improvisations of escape and exploitation. All the actors are unprofessionals living out variations on real experience.  If the merciful happy ending seems a bit miraculous, thus witnessing these people’ suffering has earned us that relief.

The film has images and situations we haven’t seen before. In one, Zain draws on his unsteady experience and observation to teach his sister how to deal with her first period. He wants her to conceal it so her parents won’t sell her into marriage. 

When Zane is forced to steal a bottle of milk from a sleeping baby, Ionas tastes and refuses it, then drops off — it’s been drugged. Even the less suffering have their afflictions and desperation.

When Rahil is under arrest, she begs her absent baby’s forgiveness when she milks herself in her jail cell, to relieve the pressure. This entire drama serves up the milk of human unkindness. 

In court Zain’s parents are allowed their moments of sympathy. Unregistered, unacknowledged, helpless and hopeless, they're resigned to perpetuating their suffering. Neither knows the simplest self-respect at even the thin end of the spectrum of white privilege. “We’re ants,” says the father, so why let Zain go to school when he could be working for the man who will wed and waste the girl.   

Of course this Lebanon story speaks to the suffering and torment throughout the world’s third world countries, the disenfranchised and the despairing, to which Donald Trump’s attack on refugees and asylum seekers has also plunged America. 

The film’s title means Chaos. But make no mistake: this film is not about the apparent chaos. It’s about the World Order so uncaring for the world’s suffering as to nourish that chaos. 

Two recent news items shadowed my consideration of this film. 

(i) Hundreds of millions of dollars have been offered to help the penurious Catholic Church restore its infernal Notre Dame cathedral. Right. Build the edifice and ignore the suffering. That’s what Jesus would say. Let a symbol override humanity. Perhaps the charred cathedral should be left as is, its broken spire an earned emblem of the religion's failure in aspiration and inspiration both. When the symbol smothers the spirit bury the symbol. 

         (ii)Disney CEO Bob Iger’s salary was $65.6 million in 2018. Disney would not make this movie. And that paled beside Discovery CEO David Zaslaw’s one-year salary of $129.4 million. Those are one year salaries. 

        This is the World Order. This callousness sustains the chaos this film exposes so heart-rendingly  

Tel Aviv on Fire

In Ramallah a contemporary Palestinian TV crew produce a popular soap opera in which the characters set out to change the historic record of the Six Days War of 1967. A Parisian Arab star Tala plays a spy who goes undercover to seduce the Israeli commander, planning to steal his plans for Israel’s surprise attack. That war did not set Tel Aviv on fire but this popular TV drama would. 

This film is a light-handed but thoughtful examination of the myths and fictions that drive both sides in that conflicted area. The Israelis and the Palestinians cling to their respective histories, which define their present perceptions and impede their warmer human connections. 

This is most explicitly dramatized in the debate over whether the TV drama should conclude with a marriage between the spy and the Israeli general, now in love with each other. That would allow for another season of drama, salaries, and work, but at the cost of political integrity. Or will the bride blow up the (camouflaged church) synagogue? Spoiler alert: at least in this fiction the inner fiction opts for life over death. 

As in myths, the end is latent in the beginning. In an early scene the cast and writer argue over whether calling a beautiful woman “explosive” is romantic. For the scriptwriter explosive violence is beautiful. She leaves the project in protest at the Israeli-style kiss turning the film into "Zionist propaganda."In contrast, the makeup girl advances to an acting career, preferring to rise in the system. The conclusion provides an alternative explosion: real life explodes into the fiction when Captain Assi pops up in the TV show to arrest the wedding couple. This gives the show's cast and crew the possibility of an extended run on TV, another season, an afterlife without dying. 

The film centrally traces the maturing of the hero Salam, an unpromising fumbler who draws a menial salary by making coffee for his producer uncle, when he isn’t stumbling into sets. When Salam tells the border crossing captain Assi he’s a screenwriter his lie gradually turns into a truth. That’s what myths do. 

The Israeli drafts scenes for him, in hopes of impressing his wife, sister and mother, who are cross-culturally enrapt at the drama. The men's partnership cracks over the classic distinction between “terrorist” and “freedom fighter.”
      For all their mutual help Captain Assi’s seizure of Salam’s ID card is a harsh reminder of their imbalance in power and the danger beneath the present charm. There is genuine pathos in the adult Palestinians having to wait sheepishly in line at the border crossing, subject to the guards' whims. The scriptwriter's ardour for explosions tacitly explains why these crossing guards are necessary.  Perhaps in unconscious recognition of this, the outsider Assi tries to wriggle into the Palestinian's story first with his scenes, then with his picture, and finally exploding into the film himself as a deus ex machina.

As Salam gains confidence he starts attending to the conversations around him and his own feelings and impulses. That prompts him to write scenes himself. As he outgrows the Israeli captain's control he lives out the history of a colonized people growing into independence. As Israel did in 1948. Salam thus becomes an emblem for the possible future of the currently unfulfilled Palestinians.

His new talent and career also win him the girl he loves and earlier lost. He wins her by replaying on screen the sentiments he awkwardly tried to express in life. Art amends the failures in life, as the Palestinians hoped their ’67 war rewrite would do. 
      The TV show's melodramatic tone and especially the sequel's repetition of the cigarette-light pickup line. establish the show as a conventional genre drama. That is, the story is constructed out of a very familiar set of repeated plot elements, m character types, settings, even dialogue. Genre films work on the understanding that the elements are very familiar, repeated over decades, with the director flashing his style and character in how he inflects those familiar, even hackneyed, conventions. 
       The point here is that repeating the same narrative may work in popular fiction -- indeed it propels the various genres -- but it doesn't work in life.  The political lesson here is that if your life repeats the old story then you don’t escape the plot. And when the old plot isn't working —e.g., suicides/deaths without progress since 1947 — maybe you need a new narrative. The genrefication of life is like the first screenwriter's aestheticizing of terrorist violence. 
       Captain Assi transcends his joyless job by breaking out of that plot and becoming a TV star. Salam breaks out of his plot of the loser Palestinian by reshaping the narrative of his life instead of plodding on it. The wardrobe girl rewrites her plot to be a star instead of dressing others. The film’s central thrust is to escape the genre narrative of terrorism (the scriptwriter’s belief that beauty can be explosive, or vice versa) and to rewrite the narrative of their life to allow growth, progress, readjusting the political reality, learning from the “occupier” and bringing him into their narrative.   

Here's a side-joke. Captain Assi initially requires Salem to bring him the esteemed Palestinian hummous. Here the drama alludes to the fervid debate over who invented that delicacy, Israel or the Palestinians. Here it’s advantage Palestine as Assi rhapsodizes over a junk hummous Salam concocts out of canned hummous long past its shelf life. For the men’s climactic reconciliation Salem brings him to the best.   
       Both warring cultures in the audience may bristle at the odd line, or find a historic nit to pick. But the overall warmth and charm should prevail. Among the various international  sources of funding for this project, the Israeli government’s film support looms significant.  

TV Masterpiece Shtisel: Season One, Episode one

This is a sample of my episode-by-episode analysis of the Israeli TV drama Shtisel. Reading Shtisel covers the first two seasons. After Shtisel analyzes Season 3 and also the writers' intervening TV drama, Autonomies. Both Shtisel books are available at  lulu.com.

Episode I, 1

The opening episode establishes the series’ major themes and devices, the Shtisel family members and their imminent arcs. The family/series name comes from a popular Mea She’arim restaurant. It evokes community, nourishment, perhaps the suggestion of a menu. Here is a range of family relationships and a range of restraints on the self — take your pick. Spoiler alert: The opening scene restaurant will, like the characters, reappear but transformed by the end. The end is latent in the beginning.

In the opening shot a ladle of food is dumped in a dish at Anshin’s cafe. This scene is revealed to be a dream when Anshin denies Akiva a pickle, it starts to snow inside the cafe and Akiva finds his dead mother Dvora eating near an eskimo. Dvora complains about the lack of pickles and the cold (common irritations in the afterlife). 

Starting the series with a dream is significant. After that first shot, we’ll have to question our bearings in every scene. This drama will shift between four levels of reality. Everything will be equally real and equally unreal. The characters’ daily lives will interweave with three alternative realities: their dreams, their memories (flashbacks) and their reunions with the dead. These four levels of reality within the drama point to two outside: (i) However realistic the characters and setting, the story itself is a fiction, unreal, but metaphoric. Everything embodies a larger truth. (ii) In the Jewish tradition, even our “real life” this side of that fiction is itself an illusion. Our real reality awaits us in our afterlife with God. 

Then, too, for these ultra-orthodox Jews, every feed or drink is introduced with a blessing, every doorway has a mezuzah to be kissed, and the conversation constantly acknowledges God’s power. Their material life is integrally connected to the spiritual. For these believers divinity pervades and magnifies the mundane. 

The initial dreamer Akiva will prove the drama’s central figure, bounded by the dynamics of the Shtisel family. Though Shulem dismisses Akiva’s dream as meaningless, he is troubled by it and reports it as his own — the first in his constant stream of lies — when he visits secretary Aliza Gvili for a free dinner. She can’t explain his dream about his dead wife: “It’s between you and her. Why are you asking me?” Aliza has a romantic interest in Shulem, to which he remains insensitive. 

In an early indication of how loving a father Shulem will prove, he consistently diminishes Akiva — even shrinking his name to Kiva, the childhood diminutive. In front of the students on the school trip to the zoo he scolds him: “If you want to draw the animals do it on your own time.” Later: “What can I say? I’ve totally given up on you.” In return, Akiva repels his arranged date by claiming that once married they would have to live with his spry father until he dies.  

Shulem treats his daughter Giti even worse. Her husband Lippe is again leaving her with their five children for six months, for his job in the Argentina branch of a Jerusalem slaughterhouse. He has been offered an alternative: a local electronics partnership. But when Giti seeks Shulem’s help she gets his silent dismissal. Then: “Why all the fantasies all of a sudden?” “Fine. I tried.” As we’ll see, Shulem considers any off-spring’s ambition a “fantasy.”

Ominously, when she returns home Lippe is furtively browsing through sporty car ads. (As we later learn, Shulem made giving up his share in a car one of the conditions Lippe had to meet to marry Giti.) To keep the peace, she tells Lippe “He loves you.”

Shulem compounds this harshness with hypocrisy. When Aliza describes how the eskimos send their elderly off — in furs and with an embrace — to die on an ice floe, he recoils: “Those gentiles. Not an ounce of compassion.” 

This moment is rich in irony. It was set up by the surreal inclusion of an eskimo in the opening dream. In a rare cross-cultural moment, that eskimo leaves his usual fare, raw fish, on the table and eats Anshin’s deli. Of course, the eskimos are no more representative of all the gentiles than these Haredim are of all Jews. The remark confirms Shulem’s insularity. 

Moreover, as a culture the eskimos—nowadays more properly identified as the Inuit — are remarkably respectful of their aged. They treat them with deference in life and with a compassionate ritual for their death. They send them off with dignity and care. Given Shulem’s disdain for his mother’s enjoyment of her TV and his callous treatment of his children, i.e., his own lack of compassion, he compounds his hypocrisy with self-unawareness. 

This ironic moment — among many others — could be considered the heart of this episode and a driving theme for the entire series: How can any religion excuse inhumanity?  

Unlike Shulem, Akiva is warm and sensitive, albeit crude with his unaccustomed authority in the classroom. When the students finally laugh at his obscure joke, he sternly silences them. He sends Israel Rotstein to the principal for drawing flip-book cartoons on his Gemarah. Akiva lacks his father’s classroom polish, but lapses into his domestic authoritarianism. Shulem is kind in the class, rough at home. Akiva, the reverse. 

Akiva has two contrasting meetings with women here. He begins the arranged date with playful concern about “the rules” that govern these meetings. Cheekily he jokes that his ambition is to become “an assistant attendant” at a mikvah (the Jewish ritual bath for women). But the attractive young woman agrees that his drawings — ostensibly by “a friend” — are “no big deal.” In contrast, when widow Elisheva Rotstein, Israel’s mother, sees his sketchbook she tells her son “The rabbi draws very well” and clearly engages with the art. 

When Akiva floats the possibility of arranging a meeting with the widow, Shulem rejects it out of hand. His NIMBY stand — Not in My Meshpukhe — flies in the face of the Jewish special commitment to the orphan and the widow. Forbidden the arranged meeting, Akiva goes to the bank where she works and invites her to a meeting. She does not appear. 

Akiva’s opening dream has two effects on him. At lunch he orders Anshin not to forget his pickle, as if his denial had been in life not dream. More constructively, he decides to honour his mother’s memory by establishing a free lending service— a gemach — specifically for space heaters. When a soaked Elisheva comes to borrow one, she and Akiva exchange increasingly warm looks as they wait for the heater to warm up. Testing the heater proves their warmth. As Akiva responds to his dream, the spiritual world can bring fear to the waking reality or it can prompt humanitarianism.

The last scene recalls the opening dream of frigidity. The Shtisels have gathered for a dinner to mark the end of their mourning period for mother Dvora. They will listen to music for the first time in a year — the cassette of a boys’ choir, Pirchei Yerushalaim singing The Bird's Nest. From that family warmth we cut to Shulem’s mother Malka in her seniors’ residence room, alone. 

Shulem objected to his mother getting a TV, which the Haredim reject as a secular danger. Indeed she does change, from initial shock to fascination with the outside world. She becomes invested in the life of an American TV family with — also forbidden in this sect — a pet dog. On The Bold and the Beautiful she learns their children’s strange names and worries about them. 

Shulem’s older son Zvi Arye, sharing his father’s rigour, disconnects Malka’s set, sabotaging her pleasure. He leaves her to watch her screen — of snow. Like Dvora in the first scene, the grandmother in the last is left with the snow, cut off from family warmth. Not just those gentiles are caught sans compassion. For all Shulem’s spirituality, his summary effect is cold dis-connection.

 

My Polish Honeymoon

Writer/director Élise Otzenberger gives her Holocaust-observance film a woman’s angle. The newlywed couple travels to Poland to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the eradication of the Jews from the small town from which husband Adam’s grandfather came. But it’s wife Anna, not he, who insists on the trip. 

More importantly, the primary healing from the experience is between Anna and her mother. Their relationship begins in mutual abrasion, as unsettling as the mother's IBS and the daughter's squeamishness. This is the family's version of the upset body politic.
When the mother disturbingly pops up in Poland, the eruption turns positive because she brings information about her own mother’s past there. When they visit the site of the grandmother’s old home the formerly combative women bond over their lost history. The mother establishes a new connection with her daughter through realizing her neglect of her own mother’s history. She now imagines what she had failed to learn.  

The primary theme is focusing one’s identity. This plays out in the framing use of Hava Nageela. Its initial appearance is an instrumental version which — like the Chopin Nocturne that follows — we recognize but have to pause before we Name that Tune. At the end we get the version with lyrics, which asserts its identity. Also,the lyrics make it more bouyant and celebratory, reflecting the two women’s growth. 

Adam and Anna are both prone to emotional outbursts. Adam bristles from Jewish self-consciousness in that once flagrantly antisemitic country. He’s sensitive to others’ sensing he’s Jewish and belligerently asserts that identity.  

He has ample cause, given the apparent monetizing of Holocaust guilt, with tours of Auschwitz advertised in glossy pamphlets, a bus offering tours of Schindler’s Factory and school kids touring the plundered remains of Jewish cemeteries. These scenes add a tone of black comedy to the serious issues.

Anna’s sensitivity centers on the challenges to her recovering her past. Mainly it’s her complete break from her grandmother, her lack of any grip on that history. This need takes comic form when she drunkenly explodes at the fine restaurant’s profaning of her traditional meat-based borscht.              For the past is, indeed, another country, as L.P. Hartley observes in The Go-Between. They do things differently there, even when the modern world veers dangerously close to repeating its nightmare.