Review: Ahed’s Knee Is a Self-Reflexive Trip Too Far Inside a Filmmaker’s Head

Nadav Lapid has never been averse to self-reflexivity, but as evinced by Ahed’s Knee—the filmmaker’s follow-up to his Golden Bear-winning Synonymes—he’s now more self-reflective than ever. The critique of Israeli nationalism that’s often the subtext of Lapid’s films erupts to the fore here—and at one point literally screamed at the camera in a long rant about the hopelessness surrounding the state of the country’s moral affairs.

The film rails against the complicitly that the official-sanctioned Israeli culture compels with the inhumanities of its government, though it also warns against taking it at its word. Lapid uses his script to play a canny game with alter egos, frustrating any simplistic reading of the forceful language used by a character who would seem to be his most obvious double.

In fact, that character, known only as Y (Avshalom Pollak), is closer to being Lapid’s stand-in than Tom Mercier’s country-less ex-IDF grunt from Synonymes. After all, Y is a director who’s fresh off the success of an arcane art film that played in Berlin. Soon after, he finds himself in a small desert town in the Arava region of Israel, where he’s due to introduce and participate in a Q&A about his work at a local library. With little to do in this desolate locale, Y begins something resembling a flirtation with Yahalom (Nur Fibak), the much younger local official in the library division of the Israeli Ministry of Culture who’s responsible for arranging his visit.

Full of despair about global warming and the perpetual oppression of Palestinians, Y wanders a landscape of dunes and rolling hills, exploring a rain-formed pond that Yahalom describes as a miracle because of how long it’s stuck around despite the unfavorable, arid conditions of the Arava region. Throwing himself into the shallow water of what was once an ancient ocean, perhaps with a mind toward suicide, he glimpses the fossil of an ancient cephalopod at the bottom. And this encounter seems to later inspire his rant to the patrons of the library where Yahalom works, in which he recites an expression attributed to his mother: “Geography wins eventually, including in Israel…and I don’t necessarily mean that in a good sense.”

Inviting a firmer identification between filmmaker and character, Y’s confrontational oratory style mirrors that of Lapid’s aesthetics. Indeed, Ahed’s Knee’s actors move uncomfortably close to the lens, and the camera jostles at random, its abrupt whip pans suggesting vertiginous assaults on the viewer. The film opens in Tel Aviv, with a dense, sensorially overwhelming scene consisting of jump cuts and plosive noises, as a figure on a motorcycle races through a thunderstorm. She will turn out to be one of many actresses auditioning for the role of Ahed Tamimi in Y’s next movie, based on the true story of the Palestinian activist teenager who an Israeli lawmaker publicly said should be shot in the knee.

That scene not only precedes Y’s journey out of the city and into isolation, it may be seen as precipitating it. We’re given only oblique views of the action, and at one point the camera is even thrown to the ground, as if in disgust. If the moment communicates a bit of the futile anger that Y/Lapid feel about Ahed’s story, it only prepares us for the pent-up vitriol that will eventually spew from Y’s own mouth. This comes late in Ahed’s Knee, in a kind of accusation of Yahalom, whose failure to see the irreconcilability of the politics of his work and the official ideology of the Ministry of Culture may be what puts her on the receiving end of this rage.

Appropriately—given the script’s unabashed self-reflexivity—any doubt about our assumption that Y is Lapid is sown by the story nested within the film about Y’s time in the army. Y turns out to be a unreliable narrator, occupying several possible positions in his tale. And Ahed’s Knee turns out to be not a monologue, but a dialogue that Lapid is having with himself about the fate of the home country he’s so disillusioned with. Dialogue as inner dialectic is certainly more interesting than a straightforward harangue, but in the end, watching the filmmaker argue with and punish himself may be a trip too far, and too exclusively, inside his head.