Melodrama Habibi

The British director Ken Loach is a great filmmaker. I’ve never seen any of his movies, not even “The Wind that Shakes the Barley,” which won the Palme D’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, but word has it that he’s a world-class director, and I figure that must be so. Just because someone is a great artist, however, doesn’t mean they have a good grasp of Middle East politics.

Loach is a big supporter of what’s known as the “cultural boycott” of Israel. In 2008 he and a few dozen other writers and artists (including a sprinkle of Jews and Israelis) signed a letter published in the International Herald Tribune protesting the occasion of Israel’s big birthday: “Celebrating ‘Israel at 60,’” read the text, "is tantamount to dancing on Palestinian graves to the haunting tune of lingering dispossession and multi-faceted injustice.” 

This past spring, Loach bullied the Edinburgh Film Festival into returning funds donated by the Israeli embassy to pay for the travel of an Israeli whose movie was being shown. He tried the same stunt in July, threatening to pull his new film, “Looking for Eric,” from the Melbourne International Film Festival, unless its organizers refused to accept Israeli government money to fly a filmmaker over from Israel. In this case, the Aussies rejected Loach’s demand, and he boycotted the festival.

Among the many voices applauding the Melbourne festival’s decision was Michael Danby, a Labor party member of the Australian federal parliament, one of two Jews to serve in that national body, who is well known as a supporter of Israel. "Israelis and Australians have always had a lot in common,” said Danby, “including contempt for the irritating British penchant for claiming cultural superiority."

I’m keen on Australia – been there twice – and appreciate Danby’s Jewish sense of humor, but I’m also an Anglophile, except for the food, and so are many other Israelis.  Sometimes I even wonder if our country would be calmer today if the Brits had never left, but that’s just idle speculation. More germane is Danby’s next remark in defiance of Loach’s foolish boycott:   

"Some people in Israel have been very critical of the Israeli film industry because of the way many films have been critical of the government's actions in the Occupied Territories," he said.  "Why would you stop showing films that ask serious questions of the Israeli government in order to spite that very government?"

As if to underscore Danby’s point, the Jerusalem Film Festival, also held in July, showcased a number of new films that illustrate the Israeli propensity for self-criticism. “Lebanon”, written and directed by Shmuel Maoz, deals with the traumas of Israeli soldiers in the first Lebanon War (as did last’s year’s “Beaufort,” which was nominated for an Oscar.) Renen Schorr’s “The Loners,” about two Russian immigrant soldiers accused of treason, is described in the festival catalogue as “a fierce story of two individuals who stand up to an alienating system.” 

The winner of the coveted Wolgin Prize, the festival’s top honor for home-grown movies, was “Ajami,” jointly written and directed by Scandar Copti, a Palestinian Israeli, and Yaron Shani, an Israeli Jew. Set in multi-cultural Jaffa, Copti’s home town, “Ajami” is an intense drama that some viewers have compared to the American hit movie “Crash.” In the opinion of the Hollywood trade paper Variety: “Rarely has the tinderbox nature of the Middle East been so accurately lensed.”

I saw none of the three. This year at the festival I opted for apolitical fare. The one Israeli movie I saw was the opening-night offering, screened under the stars in Jerusalem’s Sultan’s Pool, following an endless parade of speeches that lasted nearly as long as the movie itself: “Big Story,” directed by Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor, which concerns a group of extremely fat Jewish guys in Ramle, one of Israel’s least fashionable cities, who achieve self-esteem by becoming Sumo wrestlers under the tutelage of an expatriate Japanese sushi restaurateur. Formulaic, to be sure: think “The Karate Kid” meets “The Full Monty”. But it was a charming fable, well-constructed, very nicely acted—a good hamburger of a movie, with no pretense to filet mignon, and not a political bone in its body. Israeli critics carped; one said the film’s “fat is beautiful” message merely encourages over-eaters to endanger their health. Gimme a break. It’s a movie. Foreign audiences will love it, Jews included. Ken Loach, of course, would refuse to attend.

I also saw a bunch of foreign films, almost at random. During festival week I would get a call from my brother Josh, or my buddy Joel: hey, want to see a Colombian movie about illegal aliens (“Paraiso Travel”), a deep existential Russian drama about the Soviet space program (“Paper Soldier”) set in Khazakstan, a sentimental Lebanese satire called “Melodrama Habibi”, an understated indie flick (“Beeswax”) about 20-somethings in Austin, Texas? Yes, and yes again! And not just because these are places I’ve been and like, or places I would like to see. It’s because their political bells don’t toll for me in Jerusalem.

No man or woman is an island, this we know. The Soviet-American space race, which strained Moscow’s coffers, may have been a factor in the collapse of the USSR, the massive Jewish aliyah, the rightward shift in Israeli politics, and the indignant frustrations of Ken Loach. Call it an historical butterfly effect, or a stretched-out “for want of a nail, a kingdom is lost.” But seriously. Even dysfunctional Lebanon, so neatly skewered in “Habibi,” does not have to be my problem at a film festival, not even as I sit in the dark at the Menahem Begin Center, one of the comfy screening venues adjacent to the Cinematheque.  

The Jerusalem Film Festival is over, and I miss it already, but all is not lost.  “Bruno” is playing at the multiplex!