Audience Member
I was rooting for the camel!!
Rated 0.5/5 Stars •
Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars
01/24/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Inspired by his personal experience and the recent passing of his mother, Israeli writer-director Nadav Lapid's latest is an intensely personal and passionate film that explores cinema as an art form and asks its audience to question any authorities' encroachment into and interference with that artistic freedom. Avshalom Pollack plays a substitute for Lapid, known only to us as Y, who we see initially preparing for his next project on Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi. Name-check aside though, the main story here is about his attendance at a remote village of a screening of his previous film hosted by Nur Fibak's young Yahalom, a locally beloved and possibly more liberal-minded female officer from the Ministry of Culture who has the unenviable task of requesting Y to sign a form that essentially limits the topics he can discuss to only those sanctioned by the ministry. What follows is a strangely captivating but offbeat film that is most notable in its use of rather weird and unconventional camera angles and strikingly dynamic visual images, in which a flirtatious cat-and-mouse game between Y and Yahalom climaxes in an emotional rant by Y set against a desolate desert that may or may not represent the barren landscape left behind when the beauty of art is gone. For an non-Israeli eye, this film can seem a little inaccessible and ramshackle, and I admit I wasn't sure at first what to make of this; but after doing some background research on Google, the film's meaningful intentions begin to coalesce in my mind to become a tender tribute to the director's mother and also a powerful indictment against any form of censorship that's pertinent to an Israeli audience as well as an non-Israeli one, as long as they have access to Google.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
01/27/23
Full Review
brent m
When a perpetually disgruntled, self-absorbed, middle-aged Israeli filmmaker attends a screening of one of his films at a public library in a remote desert locale, he uses the opportunity to protest the government's increasingly aggressive and intrusive censorship of the arts. He particularly objects to having to fill out paperwork specifying the limited scope of subjects he'll be able to cover in his post-screening Q&A session, especially since his failure to comply will keep him from getting paid for the presentation. But, as significant as these concerns are, they're generally not covered in much depth until far into the film, one whose opening half is dominated by a wealth of irrelevant incidental material and pointless music video-style segments, much of it filmed with needlessly jarring camera work and punctuated with shots of landscapes, people and the sky, most of which add nothing to the narrative. When the film finally manages to get on track, it truly becomes intensely engaging (albeit somewhat preachy, though understandably so). However, by then, it's too late to effectively salvage the project, as viewers are likely to be thoroughly confused and uninterested by this point. What's more, there are several intriguing but vastly underdeveloped story threads here that, because of this lack of attention, could have just as easily been left out. It's obvious that this offering's protagonist is essentially the alter-ego of controversial director Nadav Lapid, making this film more of a personal catharsis than anything else (though that doesn't mean audiences have to sit through it). It's also ironic that this production is so unabashedly angry at some of those government-backed entities that bankrolled this very project (talk about biting the hand that feeds you). Indeed, it's unfortunate that this release never manages to pull things together to tell a cohesive, well-made story, as it appears it genuinely has something of merit to say -- that is, if you can find it.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
When Ahed's Knee ended, I experienced a somewhat frustrating day-long period of trying to decide how I felt about it. The film is challenging, there's no doubt about that, an artistic statement about the state of director Nadav Lapid's native country and his desire to be free as an artist, but how does this all mesh with what is on the screen? Are the images for us, or just the director using seemingly random images as a means of making a statement that is more important to him than it is to us?
The story of a director struggling with his own identity as an artist is, of course, nothing new. It comes down through history from Fellini's 8-1/2 to Godard's Contempt to Sturgess' Sullivan's Travels to Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful and, for better or worse, Woody Allen's Stardust Memories. What resides within the artist that completes his vision but also satisfied the demands on the audience and the culture that he has to satisfy.
The center of Ahed's Knee is on a frustrated filmmaker known only as Y and played with fiery intensity by Avshalom Pollack, whose appearance and energy reminded me a bit (brace yourself) of Anthony Bourdain. And the template is somewhat similar, a lone man wandering the landscape searching for something, a man who is cynical, weather-beaten and always forever voyaging. Y stalks through the desert while his mind races over random images (I can relate) as he struggles to create his latest work, a film called Ahed's Knee.
The outward problem is the problem of his native Israel. The film is not too subtly railing against the policies and practices of the Likud Party and, in fact, that's largely the screed that takes up the last act of the film. Leading up to that is a tense question of whether or not Y will sign a form that will allow him to get paid, but it is a form that he knows will also allow the Ministry of Culture to control and censor his work. Why they would do this obviously makes more sense to them then it does to him. In a moment of anger and rage, Lapid's busy camera pushes in on Y's angry face as he screams and rails against a government that his clearly suffocating him as an artist and therefore as a human being.
I have to admit that I was interested in the film's central core, but I was a little baffled by what came before. The film has a sometimes-disjointed palette, a manner in which it indulges the artist's appetites and flies off into a scene of bizarre art for art sake, such as a moment when Y recalls his military service and we get a 10-man platoon engaging in a mosh pit. Or the movie will glide into musical interludes that includes Bill Withers "Lovely Day."
I don't know. Maybe it was me. Maybe my American-Cinema-addled brain have been all-too prepared to reject such tangents and file them almost immediately under "self-indulgent." Is it self-indulgent, or is it the work of a frustrated artist trying to make the statement that he wishes to make, the way that he wishes to make it? I don't know. I came away from the film with mixed feelings. I appreciated the message more than the messenger. I liked the film when it got to the point, but I found myself irritated by the tangents. Again, maybe that's just me.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/14/23
Full Review
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