Past Life is an engrossing period drama that utilizes its superior mise-en-scéne and charismatic leads to overcome a tonal shift in the third act so jarring it would derail most films. For most of its runtime this is a dark film, both literally and metaphorically. The abrupt shift into bright, cheery themes for the climax both betrays the stories being told and disorients the viewer. It is too easy of a culmination for what preceded it, but the late-‘70s Israel in which the film is set is so vibrant and lived-in that writer-director Avi Nesher can get away with clumsy storytelling.
Past Life is centered on two sisters, the taciturn choral singer and composer Sephi (Joy Rieger) and the bombastic and activist writer Nana (Nelly Tagar). While performing in West Berlin, Sephi uncovers a mysterious and seemingly dreadful secret about her father’s past. The sisters’ father, Baruch (Doron Tavory), like many adults in Israel at the time, is a Holocaust survivor. He avoided the concentration camps by hiding in the cellar of one of his Polish neighbors whose grandson had risen to prominence in Germany as a composer. The grandson and Sephi meet when she is in Berlin and then, as professional peers, they forge a long-distance friendship.
Sephi and particularly the fiery Nana have a strained relationship with Baruch, who was overbearing and sometimes abusive towards them. They are wracked by angst at the thought of what their father did back in Poland before immigrating to Israel and seek out those who may have some answers. Baruch quickly discovers their plan and decides that he will simply tell them the truth. In this way, Past Life becomes a story-within-a-story.
Smartly, Nesher keeps the film in the ‘70s—there are no drawn-out flashbacks to Nazi-occupied Poland and a much-younger Baruch. This is crucial to the film’s success. The anarchist paraphernalia on the office walls of Nana’s radical newspaper, the ugly browns and greens of the furniture and vehicles and the general paranoia of both setting—Israel in 1977 was on the precipice of both peace with Egypt and war with Lebanon— and staging—most of the action is at night in dark interiors—really sparkle. In addition, Rieger and Tagar carry the film; one or both are nearly always on screen and they remain magnetic and irresistible throughout. Ultimately they, along with the set designers, manage salvage Past Life.
The film develops into a globetrotting thriller in the second act with several twists and turns that should not be revealed here. For the most part, this works. One compelling little quirk about the film is how incessantly and effortlessly it transitions between Hebrew, English, German and Polish, an ease and fluency with language that evokes universality even though only Israelis are cosmopolitan enough for such a feat. Another positive quality of the film is that Baruch’s story of struggle is one too seldom translated into popular culture. The fate of the people who lived in what is today Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Hungary and Lithuania suffered horrors and deprivations beyond imagination from 1944-1948, but their stories are mostly forgotten. In this way, Past Life is acting magnanimously in unearthing an under-told tale.
Unfortunately, most of these positive features get cast aside in a cyclone of a climax that mixes up the established character arcs and storylines. The most disappointing feature of the ending was the relative banality of Baruch’s supposedly dark past. His past transgressions, when brought to the light, are underwhelming. They read as an act of storytelling cowardice on Nesher’s part, as if he were unwilling to take the story as far as it should go. The audience is set up for some enormous sin, as in the similarly structured literary classic Absalom, Absalom!, but Past Life is unwilling to do that to Baruch, whose personal faults established during act one are abandoned to restore him as a morally neutral figure. What began as an atmospheric noir-ish thriller concludes as an ebullient, too-tidy morality play. The underlying metaphor to the story, linking Baruch to Israel, makes Nesher’s abdication in the climax even more damning; he seems to suggest that Israel’s past transgressions are not so bad and should be forgotten now anyway because of the peace deal with Egypt.
In the end, the film becomes a heavy-handed platform for the most puerile and clumsy articulation of a truly noble idea: we should learn to live together peacefully, regardless of our past crimes. This plays well with the ‘70s timeline and the eventual signing of the Camp David Accords. But for the film, it is unsatisfying. The viewer is left with the question: Was all of this multinational, multigenerational storytelling and enrapturing acting by Rieger and Tagar accomplished merely to posit a moral straight out of a children’s book, and with less grace than the average children’s book?
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