culture
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Movie review
The "knee" is a kick in the face - and a glorious farewell party from Israel
After all the storms around him, Nadav Lapid's "knee" is coming to screens in Israel.
It turns out to be a lament for his mother, as a farewell party for Israel and above all - as a celebration of cinema
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The Knee - Movie
Nadav Lapid
Avner Shavit
Friday, 06 August 2021, 08:55 Updated: 09:02
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From the movie "The Last Mercenary"
Noa Kirel
Nadav Lapid receives the award at Cannes
From the movie "The Knee" (United King Movies)
(Photo: Shai Librovsky)
Nadav Lapid's films have a tendency to come out on time. "The Cop," his first film, dealt with young activists, and was released a decade ago, just as Daphne Leaf and Autumn Shafir were leading the social protest. "The Knee", his new film, deals with the culture war that has been raging here in recent years, and is called Bezalel Smutrich's statement - and comes up here exactly this weekend when his other nonsense made headlines.
In this case, it is his tweet, in which he expressed regret that an innocent witness was not shot in the kneecap to paralyze her forever. The protagonist of the film is the son of Lapid: a political director towards menopause. We meet him as he tries to pick up a project based on the story of the Palestinian girl, and cast actresses for her character and actors for the role of Smutrich, who gets exposure here that he is not sure he dreamed of. Either way, it's all air business - the protagonist, and we too, know that in life will not allow this film to come to fruition.
When it comes to freedom of creation and expression, to internal and external censorship, the Israel in which the hero was born and raised is not exactly the same Israel in which he lives today.
Another illustration of this is obtained during the event that is at the center of "The Knee" - the director goes to a festival in the Arava to present one of his previous films.
There he meets a commissary from the Ministry of Culture, who seems to have come out of an Eastern European comedy from the 1960s or from Ephraim Kishon's Philistine, which creates an ironic clash with Lapid's modern style.
She informs him, almost casually, that he must sign a document - a sheet of paper dictating to him what is forbidden to talk about and what is allowed.
What is forbidden?
Needless to say.
What is allowed?
All sorts of meaningless expressions that have become common in discourse in recent years, like "social diversity."
More on Walla!
"My mother's death is like a knife stabbed in the back. Filming the movie was like experiencing 18 funerals."
To the full article
Like in Kishon's comedy.
From "The Knee" (Photo: United King)
The director also disconnects from the land in which he was born. Not just his knee - he has a foot and a half out of Israel, and this experience gives him the last push out. The film accompanies him on this journey, which turns out to be a double parting. He is separated not only from his homeland but also from his second, biological mother, who is dying of lung cancer.
At the beginning of the previous month, "The Knee" became the first Israeli film to be screened in the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, and then the only Israeli film ever to win the Jury Prize. Following Lapid's screenings and statements around them, many criticized him and claimed that his work and words had a built-in paradox - if we have any threat to creative freedom, how did he manage to create his new work in the first place, and more with national funding?
So let's talk about their accuracy: "The Knee" was filmed almost underground, and only a fraction of its budget was funded by Israel. "Terrible days", winner of the Ophir Prize two years ago who dealt with Bigal Amir, was made with a private investment and did not even try to get funding from the funds because of his charged and sensitive issue. Many feature films are produced in Israel every year, but in recent years only a few are political. Worst of all: almost every prominent Israeli-Palestinian filmmaker in our generation has left or is leaving the country. Is Lapid amplifying and exacerbating the situation? Definitely, and this is the way of the drama, but to say that there is no problem in producing films here about an innocent witness, is innocence.
The "knee" manages to function as a time capsule and perpetuate the cultural war that Israel has been in in recent years, and the tension between the creators and government bodies.
This is an issue that is very relevant to the local reality, but equally universal, and one does not have to go as far as Iran to find parallels.
Even in Poland, for example, a glorious cinematic empire whose we do not tickle the lapel of its sleeve, can deeply identify with what is happening here.
How to be a Dushbag.
From "The Knee" (Photo: United King)
Beyond the Cultural War, "The Knee" also deals with other national issues. As in "Synonyms", his previous film, here too Lapid returns to his days as a soldier to dismantle the Israeli myth of heroism, and like that film, here too the protagonist carries monologues in which he pulls every possible word from the dictionary to clash with his country. "Ulpan Shishi" called for a boycott of him because of this, but it should be noted that the nature of his words is not fundamentally different from statements that such and such commentators have aired there in recent years. You may have noticed that the winds in Israel are stormy. It is only to be expected that a film that is faithful to the truth will express this.
On the other hand, the "knee" also deals with other issues. Through the director's character, presumably his distinct alter-ego, Lapid confronts character traits characteristic of him and other guys like him: toxic masculinity, opacity and arrogance, an obsession with sex and everything that makes a man a doshbag. Played by Avshalom Polak, the protagonist here is a complete and convincing character, in his most miserable moments and in his few moments of grace. When he talks to his new girlfriend about Eisenstein's films and rudely slaps her that "she probably doesn't know him" - his condescension spills off the screen; When a man from the Arava gives him a ride and digs into the history of growing peppers in the place, he asks him to continue "because it's interesting" - and we can feel that I will hire, it really interests him. This is a character who has almost no facial expressions, but is all nuances.
Torch must be clever and surprising. He could cast all the usual suspects of Israeli cinema in the lead roles. Instead, Avshalom Polak, best known as a choreographer, was cast in the lead role. The clerk on behalf of the Ministry of Culture is played by Nur Pivek, a professional actress but one who has not yet played a prominent cinematic role, and in light of the quality of her performance here, it is likely that we will see many more. The man who gives the protagonist a ride also has a significant plot weight - he is a symbol of an unconscious joy of life, which the director is left only to envy and therefore hate those who represent it. It is played by Yoram Honig, who is generally the director of the film and television project in Jerusalem in his day job and not an actor, but here he provides a performance that has a powerful, even animalistic presence.
For Lapid, actors are passionate animals.
A lot can be said about the director, but at the very least, it is not clear to me how those who love cinema are not impressed by his use of this art.
In an interview with us ahead of the release of the film, he defined his work as a "celebration of cinema" - and it is indeed so.
From the opening scene, in which a motorcycle gallops towards us, "The Knee" is revealed as a celebration of editing, sound, music, photography, directing, acting and fusing images and words.
A film about death and a man who lacks the joy of life.
From "The Knee" (Photo: United King)
Along the way, Torch makes the sexy political and the political sexy. No less than his characters love to dig, they love to dance, and here we are treated to two dance scenes - one to the sounds of Vanessa Pardi, one starring female soldiers with weapons. In a sense, perhaps the best way to define this film is to categorize it as a rock opera.
But there is also a problem, which was also true of "synonyms" - the plot skeleton falls apart at some point. The story of the act itself fails to hold, and develops in a way that ranges from repetitive to puzzling, so that after the crushing opening and the strong sequel, a soft belly is formed here to a new climax in the ending scenes. It is interesting to note that this was also exactly the deepest of the previous film.
There could have been another problem as well.
Through his protagonist, Lapid talks about the processes going on in Israeli culture, and does so in a venomous manner, to say the least.
It could have been interpreted as snobbery, had it not been for the feeling that everything was said in real pain, and not in a sense of superiority but feelings of inferiority, of a man who knows he has lost a struggle, and had no chance of winning for a moment.
"The Knee" is a lament for editor Ara Lapid, the director's mother and his regular professional partner, who, as described here, fell ill with cancer and died.
It is the director's farewell party for Israel, which he will leave next week with his family for a stay in Paris, and despite all its flaws, it is also a cinema party, the only thing that has no boundaries and transcends life and death.
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