Your Understated Headline of the Week

Recent Israeli films are less political
Oscar nominee 'Ajami' is the latest in a crop of movies

that are about other topics

That was a LATimes headline and sub-headline.

And what does Eran Riklis, director of super-charged political/ideological films "The Lemon Tree" and "The Syrian Bride" say?

"There is a dangerous tendency in Israel to say there's so much trouble, don't worry, just worry about your family and your house and your jeep. And I do think in a country like Israel you have to be a socially conscious filmmaker."

Now, to illustrate why the reporter, Steven Zeitchik, is a bit lost in this film business being, ahem, non-political, here's what he writes on Riklis' next movie:-

"The Mission of the Human Resources Manager"...[is]...a dramatic comedy about a man who works for an industrial bakery, with few of the political concerns that informs his previous work. Was it difficult to move away from tensions between Jews and Arabs? "A little bit," he says, then, after a pause, adds, "but it's also kind of a relief, actually."

That movie is based on A.B. Yehoshua's novel of the same name. It's content? Well, Yulia Ragayev, a Slavic immigrant to Israel, has been killed in a terrorist bombing and whose corpse lies unidentified in a morgue for a week. The human resources manager at the commercial bakery where Yulia worked as a cleaning woman is forced to discover her identity and take action to restore her dignity by returning her body to her son and mother in her native land for burial.

Here is a review that shows, ahem, the book's non-political nature:-

A Woman in Jerusalem (dedicated to the memory of Dafna, a friend of the Yehoshuas who was killed by a suicide bomber on Mount Scopus in 2002), is divided into three parts: The Manager; The Mission, and The Journey. And if in the first two parts the manager is identified in variations of "the human resources manager," by the third part he has earned the honor of "Emissary," for he is now a man transformed by his love for the dead woman. Traveling with her coffin to a distant, cold land, he is perhaps an Emissary of God, an angel, an angel who may sometimes be the Angel of Death. This emissary, like most Israeli men, served in the army. He followed orders, and he gave orders, and, in this sense, he is part of a system that is responsible for the death of a woman like Yulia (or Dafna). Yulia is the preternatural Female, who may be dead to the living, but is, in fact, "a sleeping angel" (in the words of the morgue's lab technician). The giver of life, she is helpless against tanks and bullets, but is also indestructible.

And now let's return to Zeitchik's non-political perspective of Ajami and read what Ha-Ha-Haaretz published:-

while "Ajami" is a sophisticated detective story, it also manages to contain, in the terse way characteristic of great art, not "only" the complexity of life in Jaffa's hardscrabble streets among Arabs between themselves and Arabs from other places, but also the complexity of the loaded encounter between Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians, and Arabs from Israel and their relatives in the territories. All are shown multidimensionally.

"Ajami" is a courageous film. It is neither obsequious nor ingratiating, arrogant nor cynical. It is merciless and painful, but at the same time, and perhaps because of this, it is human and full of compassion. Therefore the viewer's heart goes out equally to the mother of the Arab hero from Jaffa, to the "illegal resident" boy from Nablus who gets into trouble because of his dying mother, and to the tough Jewish cop who appears to take pleasure in hating Arabs.

Make no mistake: the film is not apolitical. In fact, it is very political, but deals with a much deeper question than "who is right, Jews or Arabs?"

Its political power is in daringly revealing - never before seen in an Israeli film, and perhaps in no other Israeli art form - the mud into which all of Israeli society is sinking: Jews and Arabs alike, but Arabs more so, and poor Arabs most of all.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict flows, as in reality, through the plotlines, but the directors do not use it even for a moment in the usual boring way.

What crazy dissonance. On the one hand Israel will be represented in the world with a superior Jewish-Arab film, with Arabic dialogue and Arabic music, created in Jaffa only 62 years after the Jaffa elite left, followed by the flight and expulsion of many others, leaving the city bereft of its splendor. Yet the film was chosen precisely at a time when an evil spirit is growing stronger, bearing on its wings the Netanyahu-Lieberman government in whose name Israel's Arab citizens are being shoved aside into a shadowy corner.

Poor poor readers of the LATimes.