Jerusalem Film Festival 2017: Siege, Redoubtable, The Beguiled, On the Beach at Night Alone, & More

Jerusalem is a city of beige and tan, a vast barren sprawl that is, despite the brutal heat and muted colors, quite beautiful. Its odd mix of orthodoxy and modernity pair like sand and cement to create something singular and undeterrable. There’s a kind of delirious, heat stroke-induced grandeur to its aesthetic uniformity, the caramel-colored homes enclosing you and the occasional swaths of trees providing much sought-after shelter from the sun, the tan and green recalling the colors of Israeli military uniforms. All of the buildings are finished with Jerusalem Stone (which is mostly made up of limestone) to marry the new to the old, to transcend date and age. A parched and pale sky settles over sun-baked façades stacked upon sandy expanses. Feet wrapped in leather sandals slap against the sidewalk and air conditioners spittle from above. “Drink water,” everyone advises. At its apogee, the sun abuses unrepentantly, with cruel omnipotence, yet people persist and keep going where they’re going, water bottles in hand. They are stubborn.

The golden, gleaming rotunda of the Dome of the Rock sits atop Temple Mount in Old Jerusalem like a hopeful beacon. Ancient towers jab upward, and on the surrounding rooftops television satellites accumulate, the LG logo ubiquitous. A variegated flotilla of 1,000 umbrellas hangs over Yoel Moshe Solomon Street, a narrow strip of attractive businesses, art galleries, craft shops, cafés, men smoking hand-rolled cigarettes. At the intersection, three banks face each other, as if in a standoff. In Old Jerusalem, where tourists flock, many locals come to buy groceries because they’re cheaper here than in the city’s modernized section. In this indolent neighborhood, with lithe cloven streets, a butcher with a cigarette tucked between his lips slaps a slab of meat against the counter for an older woman. Tour groups in khakis and baseball hats are herded along to keep foot traffic flowing. They’re lead to the tourist section—more narrow alleys with stone floors now festooned with glittery trinkets and “handmade” scarves and coolers of Coca-Cola and Turkish coffee pots made in a factory somewhere. It all feels, at least to this tourist, like a place pilfered from an undefined era, one that belongs to no particular epoch. It feels as if it has been torn out of time.

The Jerusalem Film Festival, flags for which hang all over the city and dance proudly over the busy roads, white stallions rearing triumphantly on black fabric, is a curious entity, laidback yet passionate, with a dauntless focus on Israeli film history. Like the antiquarian city after which it’s named, the festival is beholden to the past in a way that feels almost romantic, not so much a stubborn refusal to change but rather a reverence for tradition. Time trickles here. The past lingers on screen, like ghosts from the ancient burial sites of Old Jerusalem, the excavated catacombs and dusty cemeteries that are almost full after so many centuries. (“Now we bury people up,” says Pinny, my taxi driver, swerving to avoid a jaywalker. “There’s no more room. No more land in the Holy Land.”) Everyone here is eager to discuss the city’s history, and its future, which are inexorably bound. If there’s a prominent motif that ties together all current Israeli films, it’s a sense of self-exploration, a self-vivisection of Israeli and religious identity, also inexorably bound.

It’s a lovely festival, with an eclectic array of titles, over 180 total, including American films like Sofia Coppola’s much-written-about The Beguiled and Josh and Benny Safdie’s Good Time; several selections from the ageless Philippe Garrel and that prolific master of saki-fueled, lens-zoomed tangents, Hong Sang-soo; Oliver Laxe’s Mimosas, a meditative, John Ford-inspired western reincarnated as an Islamic story of cyclical tradition; Sergei Loznitsa’s misanthropic, Dostoevsky-inspired A Gentle Creature, widely panned at Cannes but, for a certain kind of masochistic cynic, sort of great in an obvious, ugly way; and, of course, a glut of Israeli films, many from neophyte or up-and-coming directors, raised and educated in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.

But to really appreciate the festival, as well as the films being produced by Israel currently, one has to have some knowledge of Israeli film history. Most Westerners know little about Israeli culture, save for the few films that find overseas success (like 2014’s Zero Motivation, a pleasant, enjoyable film that’s almost devoid of political or social commentary, which makes it perfect for American movie theaters). This dearth of knowledge is a criticism often leveled at visiting reporters and critics, which the JFF and Jerusalem Press Club intend to rectify with an initiative to bring over critics from various countries and immerse them in local culture.

At times, it can feel to outsiders like solipsistic navel-gazing, but Israeli cinema is still relatively young—as is the country, of course. The first known film made in Israel (technically in Palestine), shot on nitrate stock in 1896, predates Israel’s statehood, and is now housed in Paris, in a special nitrate-safe vault. But Israel didn’t have commercial films until 1960; before that, they mainly produced propaganda and “educational” films. The introduction of European and American films was a kind of artistic liberation, and the influence of the French New Wave and American noir on their commercial films is obvious. Godard in particular had a profound influence on ’60s Israeli cinema, despite his vociferous anti-Semitism—though he once said that 20th-century cinema’s greatest tragedy was that there were no cameras in the concentration camps. One wonders what he would make of the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum, which ends with a balcony view of Jerusalem that suggests nothing less than heaven on earth.

Gilberto Tofano’s Siege (originally called Matzor), a 1969 classic that was recently restored and played at this year’s Cannes and had its hometown premiere at the JFF, borrows the early attitude and aesthetic of Godard at a time when the filmmaker himself was trying to shed his cool reputation and become a serious revolutionary (he failed at both). Shot in chic black and white, it recalls the blithe chutzpah of Breathless, as well as the low-key cool films of Louis Malle and meta-humor of Federico Fellini’s 8 ½. Compare the insouciance of Siege to the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, for whom the JFF had a retrospective this year; a more severe, almost frugal filmmaker, he allegedly used a tape measure to make sure his reverse shots were exact, and stripped dialogue down to the marrow. Rather assiduous, at times nearly ascetic, his formal dexterity focused on the meticulous employment of minutiae as a weapon. I’m not entirely sure what, if any, connection Melville had to Jerusalem, but the festival’s retrospective embodies its international appeal, its attempts to simultaneously extrapolate the underlying issues of Israeli culture while still drawing moviegoers and critics from other countries.

Israeli films were governed by the Ministry of Commerce until 1979, when they shifted to the Ministry of Culture and Sport. The country produced only six to eight films a year for most of the ’80s, with little Western interest. In 1989, Israeli cinema, particularly films made in or about Jerusalem, entered a new era when two revolutionary film schools were founded, lessening Tel Aviv’s sovereignty over the country’s film culture. Renen Schorr, an Israeli film activist whose 1987 debut, Late Summer Blues, is one of the country’s enduring classics, founded Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel School, and in the 2000s helped Israel join the European Film Academy. He also co-founded the Israel Film Fund in 1978 and the Jerusalem Film Fund in 1993.

Schorr is, like most everyone here, a vehement defender of Israel and its arts, and like most everyone here he uses the phrase “Hollywood” as shorthand for bad American movies. Speaking to a room of journalists and critics, he dismisses Sundance as a business that perennially churns out the same movies and American film schools, notably New York University, as being overpriced and closed-minded—too cerebral and dense, he insinuates, with not enough heart. He has a mantra: “The best special effect is a good story.”

Films from Sam Spiegel are character- or plot-driven and overtly political, not as formally punctilious or theory-based as U.S. student films often are. The Ma’aleh Film School, on the other hand, prides itself on offering solace to aspiring filmmakers who come from religious backgrounds (there’s something of a dichotomy, one laced with just-barely-discernible contempt, between the mostly secular film culture of Tel Aviv, “a bunch of young heathens,” one Jerusalem-based journalist quipped, and the more “traditional” or orthodox religious folk in Jerusalem). The Ma’aleh school also pioneered the use of film as therapy in Israel, and many of the films it produces have a cathartic quality to them. They, too, focus on characters and personal realization, not formal experimentation. The personal is political and the political personal in the new generation of Israeli films, as in Israel itself.

At a time when film festivals pop up like dandelions every year, programmers have to find ways to stand out. What’s most alluring about the JFF isn’t just the admirable array of films, most of which have screened at previous festivals (Slant has covered almost everything of note already), but Jerusalem itself, which aspires to be a beacon for Israeli film. There’s a cinematic quality to the city, with its sepia-toned horizon, vestigial edifices, blaze of white sun roasting anything or anyone foolish enough to remain unshaded. From this desiccated land bloomed three major religions and much of Western culture’s most enduring imagery, and the programmers want to steep the festival in that history and educate visitors. It sometimes feels like propaganda with a smile, the local films a form of amiable agitprop, and occasional defenses of Zionism creep into conversations without warning like ants at a picnic, but everyone is so damn friendly and passionate, always smiling and nodding, that it’s easy to get swept up and go along with it.

“It’s complicated,” everyone says of the Israel-Palestine imbroglio, that proverbial white elephant. “It’s complicated.” They will, invariably, try to elucidate, arguably convert if you’re a left-leaning person (Jerusalem is, as The New Yorker’s David Remnick pointed out a few years ago, shifting further to the right, and its media is becoming more conservative), but politics are discussed with more congeniality than in America, at least in the festival setting. (My taxi driver did say that Palestinians weren’t really people, but he seems to be in a very bitter minority.)

The JFF doesn’t have the bourgeois prestige and enviable world premieres of Cannes, or the maddening size of the Toronto International Film Festival, or the populist affability of the New York Film Festival, but it feels very much like a beloved local affair, one that unifies and galvanizes. Moviegoers arrive in droves to the exquisite Cinematheque, which acts as a central hub for the festival, and the currently-in-renovation Lev Smadar, tucked away on a lissom one-way street south of the Old City. From the outside, Lev Smadar appears ramshackle and derelict, the façade hanging lazily, its lobby floor shattered and the tables and books covered in dust and debris, but the theater proper is ebullient and clean, with assigned red seats that resemble those at the Metrograph and bathrooms with excellent water pressure.

The Cinematheque, a glorious building, has four theaters, a video store, and a restaurant inside, as well as a bucolic beer garden outside. In the basement is the Israel Film Archives, a haven for history and the pride of the city’s film culture. Everyone involved with the archives is dedicated and tireless, and they adore their work. The storage room smells like vinegar and harbors an estimated 3,500 hours of film. The red needle on the Relative Humidity meter hovers a click below 40. Every film funded by an Israeli film fund must be stored here. “People don’t always follow the law, but they obey money,” preservationist Hila Avrahami says.

Two months ago they began an exhaustive digital preservation of every film stored here, using 2K scans for 16mm and 4K for 35mm. The sound technician is wearing a Sonic Youth shirt; on his desk is a jar of Elite Coffee, a ubiquitous brand of instant coffee made with cardamom and whose iconic red label is a Israeli staple in every kitchen, and on another desk is a dog-eared copy of Arthur Miller’s Before the Fall and a biography of Pasolini, both in English. The room in which the visual footage is scanned is about the size of a college dorm room, the sonorous whirring of machinery almost tranquil, soothing. Though the archives focuses on Israeli film, it’s an international effort, in a way: Avrahami studied in America, as did the visual technician I met, and the sound preservation equipment is Swiss, purchased from Germany. A Lipsner Smith machine is used to clean the film stock before the scanning process, which takes five to six hours for a two-hour film, begins.

About eight feet away from the storage room is the entrance to the beer garden, where the JFF’s opening-night party is held. The mood here is welcoming, comfortable, and unceremonious. A multi-leveled courtyard carved into a hill outside of the theater, replete with chairs and tables and local craft beer on tap, it looks defiantly different from the rest of the city, the way a tattoo might look defiant to a more orthodox parent, but it still feels simpatico with Jerusalem’s cultural pride.

The crowd, mostly young, dressed mostly casually, hobnobs and lounges. Children are scattered among the industry insiders and festival patrons, and couples press together in lawn chairs and against the walls as the sun sets. The DJ plays music from The Virgin Suicides and Fantastic Planet and something that sounds like Serge Gainsbourg but isn’t. A lot of people are smoking and cigarette butts are strewn about the grass but nobody can spare one. Everyone seems to have purloined one from someone else, or rolled their own and just ran out of filters, sorry.

Just beyond the courtyard, trees the color of empty wine bottles or cathedral naves drink the remaining sunlight, and car rooftops coruscate along the roads that wrap around the hills. There are no orthodox religious people here, something later pointed out to me by a Ma’aleh professor. Surprisingly, no one brings up anything overtly political or problematic, at least not before they get a few pints in them. Then, several people ask me, “How’s America doing now?” as if asking how a friend under the weather is recuperating, and no one shies away from discussing politics if goaded in the slightest. (American journalists are derided as being “activists” and “crusaders” more than once, but always sotto voce, cordially. “No offense.”)

Politics pervade Jerusalem and Israeli cinema, which makes the opening-night selection, Redoubtable, an intriguing choice. Before the film begins, a message from Miri Regev, the Minister of Culture and Sport, fills the screen, and boos fill the outdoor amphitheater. “People hate her,” one of the festival’s staff whispers to me; far-right leaning and considered a Zionist, she insists that state-funded artists must show unflinching loyalty to Israel, and once notoriously called undocumented immigrants “a cancer,” which isn’t so far removed from Godard calling Jews “the new Nazis.” When lead actor Louis Garrel introduces the film, he jokes that he hopes the audience likes it more than they like Regev. He draws a swell of cheers and smiles broadly. By the time the film ends, many of the seats have been vacated.

Director Michel Hazanavicius won best director and picture honors at the Academy Awards for his affable ersatz silent movie The Artist, and Redoubtable, while more vulgar (and with some played-for-laughs ironic meta-nudity), is afflicted with a similar need to please instead of provoke. Insider baseball that will undoubtedly disappoint insiders, it depicts, with troubling simplicity, the turbulence of Goddard’s political and professional activities in the late ’60s, which were, to put it mildly, controversial. He fancied himself a revolutionary, an intellectual, decrying his own films and berating friends, such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, for selling out, and in doing so ostracizing himself from cinephiles and socialists, both of whom found him increasingly bombastic and ignorant. Here, Godard is just an asshole, not much different from an Alex Ross Perry character. (Perry’s Golden Exits, a searing, multi-character drama in the same sardonic vein as Husbands, also played the festival, though Perry’s Brooklyn clout seems to have dissipated in its transAtlantic journey, as the film caused little more than a murmur.)

Redoubtable plays like a Godard career highlight reel re-shot by film students who know what the master’s aesthetic innovations look like but don’t understand why he employed them. He turns formal experimentation into empty chicanery. Fawning and lazy, it files the barbs and brilliance of Godard’s brazen (and hypocritical) conflict with art and politics, treating his vitriol and his abhorrence for his New Wave films, and those who adored them, as a minor character flaw. Hazanavicius takes the easy way out and makes no comment on Godard’s unrepentant, vexatious Maoist leanings, which fuel the recently re-released La Chinoise and continue to inspire debate today.

There are screwball shades here, and a director with more mettle might have turned the scenario into something acerbic and articulate. Hazanavicius lifts tricks from Godard’s ’60s films—the garish color palette dominated by hyper-saturated reds and blues and yellows, contradictory subtitles, what David Bordwell calls planimetric shots and centrifugal subjects, and so on—but it just feels like a cutesy exercise in cinematic name-dropping, an attempt to prove film buff credentials. An empty, aesthetic-aping exercise that brings to mind Gus Van Sant’s Psycho, though with more self-importance than self-awareness, it was even criticized by several of the programmers for not being “entertaining” enough. (One kept referring to Shrek as the ideal opening-night movie, which is certainly more kosher than Godard.) In portraying Godard and the political movement of the era with such stark simplicity, Redoubtable feels saccharine even when it’s trying to be incisive. The best part, honestly, was when the outdoor screen wavered in the wind, which made me think of the Franscope distortions in Contempt, a bit of life imitating art.

On Friday morning, three Arab gunmen killed two Druze police officers in Old Jerusalem. My phone thrummed with texts from friends asking if I was okay. Several hours after the shooting, people sit comfortably in an air-conditioned theater watching Colin Farrell seduce Elle Fanning. The next day, I took an Instagram at Mount Temple, as if nothing were awry. It’s a weird sensation, how fugacious acts of violence seem here, in a city that’s been destroyed and rebuilt so many times by so many kings and religions. The airline, El Al, is the only commercial airline in the world to have their planes equipped with missiles. That, to me, is more incredible than anything on the movie screen.

A 15-minute walk away others are having profound ontological experiences, kissing the floor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, touching the rock where Jesus allegedly died, or putting their hands to the Wailing Wall (though the woman’s side of the wall is closed-off currently). Several days after I left, metal detectors were installed at Temple Mount, spurring riots in the streets, and an Israeli guard shot and killed a Jordanian attacker near the embassy in Amman, causing a diplomatic standoff. But maybe movies are their own profound ontological experience? Maybe cinema is a sort of religion?

The film I was most often asked about, even after the shootings, was The Beguiled, arguably the frontrunner in the international competition. Though it’s been playing stateside for two weeks and premiered at Cannes in May, Coppola’s film was the first to have a sell-out screening at Jerusalem. From my interactions with paying, non-American festivalgoers, as well as critics and journalists from countries east of France, it seems to have garnered the most attention despite (or maybe because of?) its congenitally American subject matter. The journalists from Cyprus, Croatia, and Hong Kong hadn’t seen it yet, and were frustrated that they couldn’t get into the screening.

Coppola’s adaptation of Thomas P. Cullinan’s novel A Painted Devil (though it feels at times more like a remake of Don Siegel’s 1971 film) has been heralded as an epiphanic work by her apostles and derided as a stilted retreading by her detractors. The truth is probably somewhere nearer the middle. With her usual immaculate compositions, simmering undercurrent of disquietude, and aural fixations (the nervous score is performed by the French pop outfit Phoenix, whose lead singer, Thomas Mars, is married to the director), Coppola makes a convincing argument that she’s one of America’s most aesthetically consistent auteurs, though not necessarily one its greats.

Union soldier John McBurney (Farrell) is taken in by a coterie of curious young girls residing at a Virginia girl’s school, whose sexually repressed headmistress (Nicole Kidman, who naturally exudes sensuality with every look and breath) develops a lusty fascination with McB. She watches him with a stiletto stare and unspoken thirst bubbling just beneath her words. The school, enfolded by an ever-present fog, has a hermetic quality, a place unperturbed by the world outside, a quality shared by the film itself. Siegel’s version, a liminal and amorous work made by a filmmaker known for his genre craftsmanship and machismo, has been described by pretty much everyone as “a hothouse.” In this hothouse, so fertile and venereal, nasty urges grow from natural desires. McB plants his seed, so to speak, and from this seed blossoms his own agonizing demise. Siegel’s film is claustrophobic; Coppola’s is merely airless. The film feels somehow tepid and overly manicured, as abstemious as the repressed female characters at its core. It feels fussed over like a lock of hair combed into submission.

In the original, Clint Eastwood, tall and lean, a proverbial Man’s Man with an innately sleazy quality and a propensity for volatility and violence, epitomizes the ideal leading man of the early ’70s. He’s square-jawed and mutton-chopped, chewing on words until he can spit them out all mangled and wet. His hyper-masculine braggadocio is all in service of his cock. In Coppola’s version, Farrell is too…fragile? Damaged? Sympathetic? Eastwood’s McB didn’t necessarily deserve the barbarities inflicted on him, even if he did kill that little girl’s pet turtle, but he made you want him to hurt.

Comparing two films is a potentially lazy form of criticism, but it feels necessary here, especially since many of the critics I talked with had never heard of, let alone seen, Siegel’s film, which is, frankly, astonishing to me. But even here, I’m reminded not only of cultural differences affecting how one views a film, but also how and if one can literally view a film. Siegel, hereditarily American, doesn’t translate as well as Coppola, whose Antonioni-inspired existential elegance apparently register better.

The top international prize ended up going to Hong Sang-soo’s On the Beach at Night Alone, one of three films the Korean auteur directed this year. (Yourself and Yours, which premiered last year, also played the fest.) Hong is, perhaps more than any other current filmmaker, someone whose films work best if you’ve seen his other films, an annoying but worthwhile prerequisite. Each release feels like a new chapter in a lifelong personal essay, almost Proustian in their ruminations on memory, on associations. Hong runs the risk of exhausting moviegoers with his indomitable pace, and his fans, who sometimes seem like the arthouse equivalent to Christopher Nolan fanboys, can, in their obnoxious yammering, distract from the work on the screen. But for those keeping up, On the Beach at Night Alone is one of the best cinematic experiences of the year.

Kim Min-hee, Hong’s muse and current romantic partner (their affair caused a major scandal in South Korea, where adultery was illegal until 2015), plays an actress who has an affair that throws her life into chaos. The film draws, and also veers, from Hong and Kim’s affair, a kind of postmodern play on viewer expectations. As with her previous and forthcoming roles in Hong’s films, she extrapolates the most minute of emotions from the familiar diegesis that’s the recurring theme of Hong’s oeuvre, that cloying sense of loneliness and disappointment. The film is, thematically and aesthetically, a slight departure for Hong, while still feeling unequivocally like a Hong film; he loves the mundane social situation that slowly devolves into emotional chaos, like a more loquacious and realistic Buñuel, and emotional chaos certainly reigns here, even if it’s surprisingly sober.

Though the film is divided into sections, Hong’s adoration for the bifurcation of repetition and oafish male embarrassment, both central to 2015’s Right Now, Wrong Then, are less pronounced, and his beloved zooms are sometimes eschewed in favor of discrete distance. Hong has expressed admiration for Paul Cézanne, who delineated human interactions into simple compositions full of slight but significant details. Hong does something similar. His characters sit and make small talk which, imbued by saki, gradually becomes something more revealing, something unsweetened. There’s a 10-minute long-take here that’s ostensibly simple, but in its unobtrusiveness it allows characters to spill their feelings, unfiltered, uncouth, and unapologetic. In the film’s only major moment of male perspective, Hong’s pseudo-surrogate confesses that he never got over the dissolution of their relationship, while the real Hong hangs back and watches. The scene, the film, becomes so personal, its progenitor can’t even articulate himself.

The Whitman poem from which Hong’s film takes its name is almost biblical in scope, with its astronomical, cosmic imagery ultimately reflecting something intimate. It’s trying to give name to that which has none: “Something there is more immortal even than the stars…Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter/Longer than sun or any revolving satellite/Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.” The imperfect transcendentalism of Hong, a lackadaisical variant of Whitman’s meditations, is about finding clarity amid personal turmoil, usually with the aid of alcohol and cigarettes, though sometimes coffee. Hong knows there’s a sapiential aspect to fiction, to the art of storytelling, the way it elucidates human nature. Hong’s characters tell stories to understand their history, even if those stories eventually rewrite history (see the nebulous depiction of time in Right Now, Wrong Then).

This is how it is in Jerusalem, a cinematic-looking city rife with fictions and contradictions. It’s an omnium gatherum, its residents and transients all contributing to this fabled idea of Jerusalem, to a myth manifest as a modern city. There’s an air of spectacle suffusing it, a character thousands of years in the making. The Tower of David, which is neither a tower nor a location ever visited by David, is one of the most popular tourist attractions, and acts as a fitting emblem. It looms in Old Jersualem like a legend, but, as with much of the city, the story enfolding it holds more power than the humdrum reality. No one cares if the Tower is erroneously named, if Jesus really died where the Church of the Holy Sepulchre now stands or, as Protestants believe, further East, at the Garden Tomb. The way the Sam Spiegel school preaches the importance of story, Jerusalem loves a good yarn. Everyone here, from the taxi driver to the members of the press to the tour guide, is a raconteur, spinning tales, working in unintentional tandem to write the never-ending narrative of the city. Storytelling isn’t restricted to the film festival. It seeps into the culture. It’s a vivacious and proud component that, like Whitman’s unnamed immortal, will last as long as the stars. As the tour guide said, “This is Jerusalem: Story over history.”

The Jerusalem Film Festival ran from July 13—23.