From the air, the country looks harmless, as if it had nothing to do with your own life. The grain of the desert, the jagged rock formations have an abstract beauty when you look out the window. But the interior of the small charter plane that takes filmmaker Y (Avshalom Pollak) to an Israeli outpost already reveals the innocence of the moment: the plane is also transporting a group of young soldiers. You can never get rid of this country, which has been at war since its inception.
In Nadav Lapid’s “Aheds Knie” there is a sentence that resonates for a long time: “In the end, geography always wins.” During one of his outbursts of anger, Y remembers his mother’s saying, which in turn was a favorite sentence of Haïm Lapid – the mother of the Israeli director. One’s own origins cannot simply be stripped away; it can also become a beacon. It is a recurring motif in Nadav Lapid’s films.
The focus of “Synonymes”, which was awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2019, is a young Israeli fleeing his culture. To escape the curse of the mother tongue, Yoav (Tom Mercier) – like the young Lapid in his twenties – goes to Paris. He’s cramming French vocabulary: obscene, despicable, evil, barbaric. Words that come to mind when he thinks of his homeland.
In “Aheds Knie”, which won the jury prize in Cannes last year, the protagonist wrestles with Israel, only this time he lets his bad mood out unfiltered on those around him. Y is preparing a film about the young Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, who rose to world fame in 2018 when she attacked an Israeli soldier with her bare hands and was sentenced to prison. Knesset member Bezalel Smotrich, a hardcore Zionist, said at the time that Tamimi deserved a knee shot.
Surrounded by their own country
“Synonymes” still possessed a musical grace that “Aheds Knie” now completely lacks. An actress auditioning for the role of Ahed Tamimi sings to the mangy hard rock of Guns N’ Roses, a bizarre burlesque theater in military uniforms that ends in a pogo to an Israeli punk song. And when Y dances lonely in the desert to Vanessa Paradis’ pop hit “Be My Baby”, the camera performs the wildest pirouettes. In “Aheds Knie”, music is a skipping action, just as the rushed camera perspectives seem to be constantly looking for a subject or at least a spatial localization. Sometimes the camera almost encroaches on people, in extreme close-ups. The frontal attack acts as Lapid’s modus operandi.
Y is not a popular figure. He treats Yahalom (Nur Fibak), the young employee of the Israeli Ministry of Culture, who arranged the screening in a remote settlement in the Arava, a desert-like depression on the border with Jordan, condescendingly. He pees in the dust at one of the sights in the desert. Geography always wins: the small bungalow that Y moves into when he visits has two glass fronts; the window looks directly at the mountains in the background. The country has literally surrounded the protagonist of Ahed’s Knee.
The paranoia is palpable in Lapid’s film: through the tear pans in the conversations between Y and Yahalom, which are more reminiscent of interrogations; in flashbacks from his own military days that gradually seep into the plot; in the growing frustration with state policies that directly interfere with cultural life. Y sees the young ministry employee, who actually only wanted to give her favorite director an appearance, as the representative of a repressive system.
Lapid hardly leaves any time to breathe
Because before he receives his fee, she insists, the controversial filmmaker has to agree that he will only speak about contractually agreed topics in the audience discussion that follows: the diversity of Jewish culture, Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, the eternal capital Jerusalem. Life in the occupied territories and the oppression of the Arab minorities are not on that list. The following tirade, into which Y escalates, is worth seeing in its self-righteous fury: “I’m throwing up Israel out of me, in the face of your Minister of Culture!”
The right to physical integrity, symbolized by the activist’s eponymous knee, also becomes an indirect motif of the film. Avshalom Pollak’s past as a choreographer – “Synonymes” actor Tom Mercier also originally comes from dance – is no coincidence. The vitality of Lapid’s aesthetics can probably only be understood as a direct reaction to the circumstances: political affective cinema that becomes an impertinence in its appellative character.
(In the Berlin cinemas Filmkunst 66, Brotfabrik, fsk, Passage, Tilsiter Lichtspiele, Wolf, also original subtitles)
The fact that the politics of male bodies – even more delicate, playful in “Synonymes”, this time frontally – only helps to a limited extent as a response to state aggression is occasionally lost in Lapid’s reckoning with the country of his birth. Because “Aheds Knie” hardly gets a chance to breathe, which is also why Y’s legs apart in front of the desert panorama in one of the more contemplative moments are irritating. In a film dedicated to a young woman at that.
As an unfiltered expression of contemporary Israeli cinema, however, Aheds Knie is hard to shake off. Rather, it is surprising, especially given Lapid’s vehement criticism of Israeli cultural policy, that his film received government funding. He obviously needed to get Ahed’s Knees out of the system, like a personal exorcism. You can sense this urgency in the film. Nadav Lapid wrote the screenplay for two weeks, for the first time without the help of his mother Haïm, who died two years ago. Cinema can hardly be more immediate. And seldom has the phrase about the political in private been as appropriate as in this bundle of unresolved feelings.
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