During periods of crisis, which seem constant nowadays, our daily grind can feel frivolous. What is the point of writing a film review or doom-scrolling through Twitter when there is widespread suffering? That hopeless feeling must be more acute for artists, who feel some measure of responsibility because they have a platform and their job is using their gifts to reflect the world around them. Ahed’s Knee, the new Israeli film from Nadav Lapid, uses abundant self-awareness and outrage to tackle this question seriously.
Its hero is a filmmaker, an obvious stand-in for Lapid, and how his participation in one small promotional event becomes an allegory about how the Israeli government sells propaganda to its people. Parts of the film are clunky, even experimental, a conceit whose subtext is all about artistic struggle. It is so tortured and ultimately complex that it kinda works in spite of itself.
When we meet Y (Avshalom Pollak), he is busy casting a video art project about Israeli police brutalizing protestors. The tension between meaningful critique and popular appeal is not lost on Y, who wants to preserve some integrity while creating something that will interest actual audiences. All that is put on hold, however, because Y heads to a remote village where one of his films is being shown. His handler is Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a local librarian who has become the area’s de-facto cultural historian.
At first, their conversations are polite and even flirtatious, but their respective occupations have created an impasse that neither wants to discuss. Yahalom is not just a librarian, but effectively an enforcer of the status quo, while Y sees himself as something between an artist and provocateur. Y’s secret agenda is to humiliate Yahalom, exposing her as a thoughtless mouthpiece, and does not go to plan because his empathy contradicts his frustration over what she represents.
Why does Y have this nefarious plan? He justifies himself to Yahalom and the audience all throughout the film’s lengthy middle section, which centers on a flashback that involves his mandatory military service. He speaks about his time at the Lebanese-Syrian border, and we see a depiction of the Israeli military where camaraderie devolves toward shared psychosis. In the flashbacks and other scenes, there are layers and references throughout Ahed’s Knee that are lost to non-Israeli audiences, and yet its painful central message is universal. For Yahalom and her neighbors, the price of a comfortable life is the acceptance of a narrative that denies their country’s wrongdoing. Lapid shrewdly brings unspoken, shared lies to the surface, as if Y’s principled, artistically-driven outrage is the only way to arrive at a deeper truth.
Like his last film Synonyms, Lapid is able to suggest a sense of spontaneity by having his camera and hero behave in unpredictable ways. Parts of Ahed’s Knee are shot to make the audience acutely aware of the camera, zooming and panning in ways that are borderline aggressive. Other sequences have a more natural feel to them, with edits and long takes that plunge us into the arguments the characters are having. Tension inflates and deflates constantly, which is why the film’s climax – Y’s extended monologue of visceral disgust – is downright jarring. Pollak is a convincing conduit for Lapid, although Fibak’s role as a hapless observer is more critical to the effect. She is a stand-in for the average Israeli, and anyone else who wants to appreciate art without confronting what it implies.
A film this overtly political is going to be alienating, and Lapid is unapologetic about his far-left ideology. He believes Israel is guilty of wrongdoings that are so pervasive that reckoning with them might be impossible, and acknowledgment is the only recourse an artist has. This creates a sense of ambivalence about the Y character: he can be pretentious and off-putting, and by the end of the film Lapid has more sympathy for him than loathing (or maybe self-loathing). There is a lot in Ahed’s Knee to discuss and pore over, and while it can be uneven, his “kitchen sink” approach is by design. When an artist faces an impossible question, this film suggests the only courageous thing is to try everything at their disposal to answer it – no matter how silly, vindictive, and grandiose they might seem along the way.
The post Ahed’s Knee appeared first on Spectrum Culture.