Friday, Aug 29, 2008
It's Ambiguity Week! Plus: Orthodox Hasidim, Palestinian suicide bombers and the weirdest good film of the year.
Oct 27, 2005 | Gidi Dar says the opening of his film in New York came with a sign from God. OK, he didn't say that exactly -- Dar is a secular Israeli, and although he directed "Ushpizin," the first feature film made within the closed world of Israel's ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community, he doesn't share his characters' (and actors') intimate, personal relationship with the deity.
What Dar actually said was, "It's like something from above." He was talking about the fact that his film was opening in the same New York theater, at virtually the same time, as "Paradise Now," the film by Palestinian-born Hany Abu-Assad that explores the world of two would-be suicide bombers from the West Bank. On the most obvious level, these movies are set in very different realms, even diametrically opposed ones. But they're a lot more similar than you might think. First of all, they're movies, not lectures or political tracts. They invite you to set aside all your confident and wildly uninformed prejudice and identify with someone else's perspective -- which turns out, of course, not to be alien or deranged but recognizably human.
Both movies are taking incoming fire for exactly the wrong reasons, which only makes me want to root for them more. "Ushpizin" is a comedy with no explicit political content, and a lot of critics are seeing it as a squishy "ethnic" film for Jewish audiences, basically "My Big Fat Hasidic Wedding" (except that the couple is already married and never even touch each other on-screen). Meanwhile, "Paradise Now" has been understood in some quarters as sympathetic to Palestinian terrorism, when in fact it offers no justification -- and no real explanation -- for its characters' apocalyptic course of action. Both movies will melt the borders of certainty and make you understand, as Dar puts it, how little we really understand the world. Not everybody welcomes that experience.
Fall is busy-bee season for indie distributors, as for the rest of the world, and as usual we've got more worthwhile flicks kicking around than I can sit through, even less write about. Rounding out Ambiguity Week, we've got a strange and dazzling film by a first-time French director, and the re-release of Michelangelo Antonioni's greatest work. The first one might be the surprise of my moviegoing year to date (in spite of, or perhaps because of, the fact that it's probably illegal in several states). And while the master of Euro-angst cinema has never totally been my glass of absinthe, who can resist a wide-screen travelogue featuring the Gaudí architecture of Barcelona and a young Jack Nicholson lost in the Sahara?
"Ushpizin": Uninvited guests in a temporary home
Generally speaking, movies have to stand or fall on their own; understanding context can be helpful, but it should never be essential. "Ushpizin" is an exception to this rule, or something close to it. It's a charming comedy with a philosophical undercurrent that provides a fascinating glimpse of Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Jews, who live in a realm almost literally sealed off from outsiders. But the most remarkable thing about the film is that it exists at all.
Gidi Dar made "Ushpizin" with his old friend, the Israeli stage and film actor Shuli Rand, who some years ago joined a fundamentalist sect known as the Breslover Hasidim and withdrew from show business. They agreed that making a feature film inside the Hasidic world would create an opportunity for dialogue between the secular and religious communities in Israel. While for understandable reasons the world remains focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Dar insists that the mutual mistrust between left-leaning, nonreligious Jews and their Orthodox countrymen in Israel is "much worse" than between Jews and Arabs.
Dar agreed to work entirely inside the Hasidic worldview: There would be no filming on Saturdays, and the movie, in fact, is not even shown on Saturdays (ordinarily that's a big moviegoing night in Israel, like everywhere else). Male and female actors would never touch each other. If Rand was to play the husband in the film, the wife would have to be portrayed by his actual wife, Michal Bat-Sheva Rand, who had never acted before. (She turns out to be a forceful, if almost cylindrical, screen presence, and almost predictably steals the show.) Rand wrote the script and got approval from his rabbi before he let Dar begin shooting it.
Even so, Dar had a kind of stealth agenda. If the two friends agreed on how to make the film, they didn't agree on what it was really about. Rand and his wife play a Hasidic couple, Moshe and Malli, who are childless and nearly broke. They've been pleading with God for a financial break, and by the way for a son. As the holiday of Sukkot draws near -- which requires observant Jews to spend several days living outside their homes, in a temporary shelter -- Moshe has no money to build one, or even to buy the ceremonial citron (a lemonlike fruit) demanded by ritual.
For Rand, this is a comedy based in God's word, in which prayers are answered and faith is tested. Money appears to Moshe and Malli, as if from heaven (to be specific, $1,000 in cold, hard American cash). So does a sukkah, or plywood shelter, although its origins are mysterious. And so do a couple of dubious and decidedly nonreligious characters from Moshe's past -- and it's every good Jew's duty to welcome guests during Sukkot, no matter who they may be. ("Ushpizin" is the Aramaic term for such holiday guests.)
Get Salon in your mailbox!
