A CHALLENGING FESTIVAL OF FILMS

Do Jews have film festivals? Why not? There are about 60 film festivals highlighting Jewish filmmakers throughout the world, including Hong Kong. You don’t have to be Jewish to enjoy them, or to be upset by what you see. But if you’re upset, well, that’s your social entrance ticket.

The Jewish Community Center, in collaboration with the Dryden theater at the prestigious George Eastman house in Rochester, sponsored a festival of films covering a wide range of subjects, from a sing-along ”Fiddler On The Roof” to Amos Gitai’s ”Kippur”, which started the festival off with a mud sludged boot. The filmmaker revisits the 1973 Yom Kippur war, when Egyptian and Syrian forces invaded Israel without warning. In a sequence of stationary long shots, the camera follows a young man leisurely walking down the streets of an Israeli town, while ear splitting sirens announce the attack. Everyone is in a synagogue preying. No one expects anything terrible to happen. But Israel being a small country, the war is right down the road.

”Kippur” is based on the “director’s” experience of losing his army unit, and then volunteering to work with a helicopter crew rescuing wounded and stranded soldiers. The film has been compared to Steven Speilberg’s ”Saving Private Ryan”. There is no comparison, except in the rescue team effort. “Saving Private Ryan” highlighted the traditional Hollywood pump on patriotism, with well defined cross cuts and jump shots, special effects. back up love stories, and lots of money.

”Kippur” takes another road altogether. For one thing, you never see the enemy. Alternating between the weary aftermath of battle scenes, and the silences of soldiers in a helicopter, numbed by open wounds, death, and the clinging memories  of loved ones, war is seen in all its stifling drudgery and low expectations. Tanks, with torrents endlessly twirling, race back and forth across the screen in sequences of obsessive maneuvering - going nowhere fast. Like locusts, chewing up everything in sight.

Although the film has continuity problems (a dead soldier grips a stretcher - very much alive), its sense of destructive repetition coupled with sensuous lovemaking has striking impact. Two lovers embrace, twist and turn in a goo of saturated paint: blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag, and black, red and green, the colors of the Arab cause.

Mired in paint is one thing; mired in mud another. Soldiers grapple with a stretcher in a battlefield of smoking, twisted ruins, carrying a severely wounded man. They slip and slide in the mud and get up and try again – and again – and again. A doctor, also wounded, has the impossible task of trying to bandage the dying man with clean gauze and inject a shot of morphine to alleviate his pain. When they realize the soldier is dead, the stretcher barriers lapse into a trance of exhaustion and sorrow. There is nothing romantic about the film, It doesn’t duck behind patriotism. Instead it reveals the futility of war with a sinking feeling of not knowing where to go next.

DAD ON THE RUN

French director Dante Desarthe’s farce races from one funny episode into another. The film opens with  a young man,  Jonah (Clement Sibony) found shivering in a frozen food locker, huddled under a pile of fish. The film is about how he got there and why. Logic being the essence of farce, and seriousness of purpose the other side of the coin, in this film the two go hand in hand. 

In a flashback Jonah is found playing the piano at a traditional bar mitvah party. Getting an emergency phone call, he hurries out the door and rushes to the hospital where he finds his wife nursing a baby boy. Told to expect a girl, they now need to find a compromise circumcision ritual that will satisfy both sides of the family. Of mixed Jewish heritage, Sephardic and Ashkanazi, they  elect to do a North African ”bris” - complete with a rabbi who knows how to do a circumcision painlessly, and brags about it. The baby boy is asleep, winces, goes back to sleep, no crying – and that’s it. Now the father must bury the “little end” in the earth within three days. Otherwise the child will be plagued with bad luck for the rest of his life. Hence the frantic quality of the film and its outrageous humor.

Dad On The Run focuses on Jonah’s efforts to bury the foreskin and do it right. He runs into one obstacle after another. Caught in a compromising position with the seductive mother of the bar mitvah boy, through no fault of his own, he finds himself the object of a chase by gangsters – set off by the father of the bah mitvah boy out to teach him a lesson. He loses the foreskin, finds it, and then loses it again.

The film takes place in Paris in 1998, during the visit of the Pope. The highlight of the film occurs when Jonah runs into a group of young Catholic zealots in a subway celebrating the Pope’s visit. They take their newfound Jewish friend in tow, and snap a photo of a bewildered Jonah standing in front of a cross. Well, you can strike the attempted conversion up to angst, or think of it as a comic twist of fate. I prefer the later.

The second story line is an extended riff between Jonah and a determined woman whose consuming ambition is to have her picture taken with the Pope. She does. You are left with a number of unanswered questions: who is that woman on TV standing next to the man in the white robe, and what is she doing here? What is the theological message of the film? And what does the little end of it all mean? Here’s what I think the message is: don’t run around Paris looking to bury a little end, when all the time it has been in your pocket wrapped in tissue paper.

 THE GOLEM

Viewing this influential 1920’s German expressionist film, how could you not be reminded of how much James Whalen relied on The Golem to create Frankenstein? Directed, acted and designed by Paul Wegener, the Golem, a proto-human clay man, a haunting  figure in Jewish mysticism, is based on a legend about Rabbi Lowe in 16th century Prague. According to the legend Lowe created the clay figure to protect Jews from being expelled from Czechoslovakia by the emperor. The Golem is both a messianic figure and ”a willing slave” – a puppet who eventually turns the tables on its master.

At the opening of the film Rabbi Lowe, an astrologer, is seen searching the heavens for a signal from the Creator. And this isn’t a drop in the bucket sky. The heavens glow with other worldly illumination, thanks to the cinematography of Karl Freund. Freund shapes the film with compelling chiaroscuro effects. Houses in the ghetto are bent out of shape by grotesque swaths of dark, twisted, troubling lining, and people are wrenched into a light that pulsates with potential disaster.

After Lowe creates the Golem, the creature rises as a fiercely determined, buttoned down humanoid struggling to get out of its skin of clay. A risible creature on the look out for a human spirit he can call his own. Twist the mystical symbol of a five pointed star on its chest, and the creature bolts up from the floor. Untwist the five-pointed star and it collapses.  Once you get a handle on it, you can control it one-way or the other. Just don’t pretend it’s a toy.

The rabbi, with his reputation for unseen powers, goes to the emperor to persuade him to reverse the edict against the Jews. The emperor asks the rabbi to do something fantastic in return. The good rabbi says he will, but the emperor and his court must not laugh. Rabbi Lowe then projects a panorama of wandering Jews suffering through the centuries with never ending lines. The emperor and his court break out laughing. The walls and ceiling of the palace crumble. Falling to his knees he begs for mercy; a distinguishing trademark of emperors on their way out the door. The Golem enters and with one shove shoals up the walls of the palace - like Samson in reverse.

Now the strange, buttoned down creature goes on an angry rampage, taking out his revenge for not being given the gift of humanity. Masses of frightened people huddle together in the ghetto under flickering torches and dark peril. Finally the Golem’s fury is assuaged by a little girl who hands him a flower. He smiles, brought to the edge of humanity by her innocence. When the little girl playfully twists off the five-pointed star, he falls back dead. Such is the nature of things that if you remain buttoned down you have nowhere else to go.

The live piano accompaniment by Philip C. Carli was a welcome addition to the silent film. But it was overdone and lacked the folk quality the film needs. I longed for an extended silence that makes the heart clutch with the anticipation of the unexpected; a silence that bears witness to the horrors of the 20th century that were yet to come.

 LEFT LUGGAGE

The most powerful film in the festival, director Jeroen Krabbe’s Left Luggage,  takes  place in Antwerp, Belgium, 1972. It is hard to believe this is Krabbe’s directorial debut. The unfolding of the story, the casting, and the sensitivity with which the filmmaker explores the character relationships is warmly knowledgeable and revealing.

The story follows the journey of a young philosophy student (Laura Fraser) who takes on the job of a nanny to a Hassidic family – despite her initial misgivings – and is put to the test. When she bonds with the Hassidic family, especially the little boy, she discovers where her own father is coming from and why he is the way he is. With penetrating complexity, and shared human dilemmas, the film explores what it means to be liberated in a world of troubling memories, and how much we have in common despite our differences. And it doesn’t come up with easy answers.

A cast that includes Isabella Rosellini expertly performs Left Luggage. Rosellini portrays with sensitivity and detailed observation a homebound Hassidic mother of four. The Israeli performer Topol matches her skill and depth of feeling. This excellent performer’s portrait of the head of the Hassidic household reveals a man with a severity of spirit so steeped in tradition, he can’t see what’s in front of his eyes. A religious man with a profound capacity for suffering who refuses to see the suffering he does to others. His dilemmas are mirrored by Maxmillian Schell – the father of the young nanny – whose obsession with the luggage he left behind when he escaped the Nazis is a painful reminder of the family he left behind to die in the death camps.

It is the relationship between the young woman and her father, and her confrontation with the father of the Hassidic family over the education of his son, that delivers the punch of the films humanity and its pychological resonance.

The film’s best moments are constructed around a wonderfully developed, loving and sweetly touching relationship between the Nanny and a very young redheaded boy with ringlets, who captures her heart and dedication. The conflict she has with the Hassidic father of the boy over his education fuels the dynamic of the film and leads inevitably (but unexpectantly) to the climax. A tragedy that affects every one concerned and leaves no one unscathed.

This is a film that calls out to you whatever your background and concerns. A film about memory and its power over our lives; a film that cuts across borders. An academy award film, if such a thing is possible.

© 2001 Ned Bobkoff

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