Ahed’s Knee is a cri de coeur from Israel’s most acclaimed director – his 2019 film, Synonyms, won the Golden Bear, the top prize at the Berlin International Film Festival – about creeping censorship of art in Israel.
It stars Avshalom Pollak as Yud, a depressed Tel Aviv-based director, in the middle of casting a new video he is making about – the title gives it away – the arrest of Ahed Tamimi and the subsequent political fallout. You will recall that Tamimi was a Palestinian teenager who hit a soldier during a protest and was arrested and detained for months. Her case drew international attention and back home, MK Bezalel Smotrich tweeted that she should have been shot in the knee rather than arrested (for which he was briefly suspended from Twitter). The title also references Erich Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee, the story of an intellectual obsessed with only one part of a young woman’s body. The auditions for the video about the Tamimi case, with actors playing the real-life figures, are done with a kind of comic bitterness. We learn that Yud is struggling with depression and that his mother is dying.
Next, he is off to a speaking engagement deep in the Arava. Yahalom (Nur Fibak), the librarian who is running the program, greets him eagerly. Most of the rest of the film consists of long conversations between them, as they walk around the desert landscapes, or Yud wandering himself. Yahalom – whose name is the Hebrew word for “diamond,” which cannot be a coincidence – is full of pure love for literature and the arts, a young woman who grew up in this remote spot and has chosen to stay there and try to enrich it. She is perhaps meant to be a metaphor for mainstream Israel. It seems that there may be a spark between these two lonely souls as they walk together, but then she tells him that he must sign a pledge to only speak about banal, approved topics, a request that seems to shock him and that he takes as a narcissistic injury. His outrage leads him to threaten to betray her in a way that will destroy her career after she admits that she understands why he finds the demand onerous but that she must make it anyway.
The context of the movie is that it was written during the tenure of former culture minister Miri Regev, who went out of her way to antagonize the arts community, including making provocative statements about how she was proud that she had not read Chekhov. I can certainly sympathize with how having her at the helm of the Culture Ministry might drive someone to rant, but the rants here, while they are colorful and well-written, quickly become repetitive and boring, not to mention a little grating. Sample quote: “I will vomit the Israel out of me into your culture minister’s face.”
This is basically the movie, with two other episodes. One involves his meeting with a guy who gives him a lift and tells him about his life, then breaks into an unexpectedly sweet dance. This driver is played by Yoram Honig, the founder and director of the Jerusalem Film and Television Fund. I knew he was great at public speaking, but did not know that he danced or acted, and his scenes are a welcome diversion. Then there are scenes, set to loud pop music, in which Yud tells a story about his army service. The soldiers thought they were trapped in enemy territory and were about to be captured or killed, when their commander ordered them all to take cyanide pills, which of course were not really poisonous. The sequence is some kind of muddled fantasy take on Israeli militarism, but the sudden bursts of music and action, like Honig’s scenes, provide a respite from the rant.
Ahed’s Knee belongs to a rarefied subgenre of movies about filmmakers whose success does not alleviate their general malaise. The most famous of these (and the best) is Federico Fellini’s 8 and 1/2, but there are also such titles as Paul Mazursky’s Alex in Wonderland, Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories and Gur Bentwich’s Peaches and Cream. It might seem as if it is fun to be a celebrated film director and have admirers lionize you, these films are saying, but really, it’s hell.
IN ADDITION to these films and the Pauline Kael line, Ahed’s Knee brings to mind other quotes. First, to address the elephant in the room, Lapid has come under criticism for taking money from the Israel Film Fund, the Israel Film Council and the Culture and Sport Ministry, all governmental or government-supported entities, for a film that offers a critique of the government. Lapid has emphasized that he took only about NIS 100,000 from these sources, out of a budget of several million shekels. While it is true that these government-supplied funds were not the major sources of the budget, donating money indicates a stamp of approval, which, no matter what Lapid’s attitude is, mutes his critique. Or, as Fran Lebowitz wrote in an article “Tips for Teens”: “Should your political opinions be at extreme variance with those of your parents, keep in mind that while it is indeed your constitutional right to express these sentiments verbally, it is unseemly to do so with your mouth full – particularly when it is fullf the oppressor’s standing rib roast.”
Or, to quote A. J. Liebling, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one,” a lesson it is high time for Yud, who looks to be in his forties, to learn.
As Yud rambles through the desert pouring out his heart in a way that will endear him only to film-festival juries and critics who confuse being bored with being challenged – and who have hailed this film, and his previous work, as edgy and disruptive (high praise these days) – another quote, from critic Paul Valery, came up: “Everything changes but the avant-garde.” The long scenes of Yud walking and talking are similar to those of Godard in the films he made over the last 30 years, after he abandoned such archaic concepts as plot and characters. It’s films like Godard’s recent work and Ahed’s Knee that make people think they don’t like serious artistic movies. Or, to return to the Kael quote, there is a lot of feeling sick here, but not a lot of soul, and without soul, movies don’t mean much.