Big Eyes, the 1974 Uri Zohar film with Arik Einstein, has been digitally restored by the Israel Film Archive (IFA), and the restored version had a festive and emotional premiere at the Jerusalem Film Festival at the Jerusalem Cinematheque on Tuesday night.
Festival director and cinematheque CEO Dr. Noa Regev said the screening was dedicated to the memory of Tzvi Shissel, one of Zohar’s frequent collaborators, who co-starred in Big Eyes and who passed away in late July. Shissel’s family attended the screening, and one of his sons spoke about how his father had been involved in the restoration process and had been planning to attend the screening.
IFA manager Meir Russo spoke about how the film was restored in 4K with the Opus Digital Lab in Tel Aviv, under the supervision of the film’s cinematographer, David Gurfinkel, who attended the screening. The IFA was created by the festival and cinematheque founder Lia van Leer, who used her personal collection of movies to start it. It has since grown to include every film ever made in Israel, as well as many others, with more than two million meters of film altogether and a website that features thousands of Israeli gems (https://jfc.org.il/). Every year, the IFA chooses a classic Israeli film to restore digitally, a painstaking, labor-intensive process.
Big Eyes has rarely been screened for decades, and in recent years, the Arik Einstein version of the title song, for which Einstein and Zohar collaborated with composer Mickey Gavrielov to write lyrics, has been better known than the film itself. Gavrielov performed the song before the screening, and explained that he sang the version of the song used in the film because on the day Einstein was supposed to record it, he had a sore throat.
Big Eyes was the penultimate film in which Zohar directed and acted before he left the entertainment world to become a haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rabbi in the late 1970s. Einstein, his close friend and frequent partner in comedy, music and movies, took Zohar’s transformation as something of a betrayal, which he wrote about in several songs. It was an especially charged situation, because Einstein’s first wife, Alona, followed in the footsteps of Zohar and his wife, and also became haredi, raising their two daughters in the haredi world. It became even more complicated in the 1980s, when Einstein’s daughters married two of Zohar’s sons.
That is the backstory that adds layers of complexity to this film, which was co-written by novelist and playwright Yaakov Shabtai. Zohar stars as Benny Furman, an intense Tel Aviv basketball coach. Married to a sensible woman named Elia (played by Elia Zohar, Zohar’s real-life wife to this day), he has two children and might seem to have an ideal life. But he is cheating on Elia with two other women and runs around the city all day, sometimes with his baby son in tow, trying to put together a deal to open a sauna. He expects his best friend, Yossi (Einstein), a player on his team, to go along with whatever scheme he comes up with, but he is pushing everyone – and himself – too far and his compartmentalized life begins to implode.
Shissel plays the spoiled son of the team owner, who, in an anachronistic touch, boasts about hitting his girlfriends. Sima Eliyahu, who became Einstein’s second wife, plays one of Benny’s girlfriends, and Alona Einstein is glimpsed briefly as Yossi’s girlfriend. In one scene, Zohar and Einstein stand on the street with Einstein’s first and second wives.
The film, in black and white, features extraordinary cinematography by Gurfinkel that came across beautifully on the big screen. It reflects the claustrophobia Benny feels as his life falls apart, and adds to the excitement of the basketball games.
The natural beauty of Sima Eliyahu and Elia Zohar is heightened by Gurfinkel’s work. They look like real women, not movie stars, and are incredibly lovely. Had the film not been in Hebrew, you might think that it was made by a French New Wave director, because of the cinematography.
The movie is also a wonderful opportunity to see Einstein in a dramatic role. He made several movies, but not enough. He more or less steals Big Eyes with his charismatic, playful and brooding presence.
Big Eyes is a critical part of Israeli film history, but it is a flawed movie. It is fascinating how unpleasant Zohar makes Benny, who is clearly a kind of alter-ego for the director (the fact that his real wife plays his on-screen spouse, using her own name, is a tipoff).
In the 2018 documentary Zohar: The Return, he said of Big Eyes: “In the end, we played ourselves, our lives.” Benny is a self-involved liar and cheat, who lashes out at everyone around him, from his best friend to his wife and mistresses. He seems to be filled with self-loathing at the same time that he justifies everything he does.
Benny’s lack of charm limits the power of the film. We have all known people whose behavior strikes us as reprehensible on some level, but whom we found attractive nevertheless. This is not the case with Benny, who never seems to learn anything or feel any sympathy for the people around him. It reminded me of a line from a Peter Cook-Dudley Moore skit, where a man is asked if he has learned from his mistakes. “Oh, yes,” he replies. “I’ve learned from my mistakes, and I’m sure I could repeat them exactly.”
Benny Furman, it seems, is destined to keep repeating his mistakes exactly for the rest of his life, although the cast of characters around him will undoubtedly change. There is no way to see this movie without thinking about the drastic change Zohar made in his life just a few years later. Whether you find his embrace of haredi life repugnant, admirable or just odd, he did change the pattern of his life, and this film may provide some clues as to why, it seems, he has never looked back.