Time and Again
In the entertainment industry’s rush to temper its appetite for violence after September 11, much of the media’s attention turned to the postponement of the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Collateral Damage. One of the less visible casualties appears this weekend at the Fourth Annual Jewish Film Festival.
Joseph Cedar’s Time of Favor won six Israeli Academy Awards last year, including best picture. According to New York Jewish Week, the film’s distributor, Kino International, decided to delay its September 28 opening “because Jewish terrorism is not a subject moviegoers are ready to encounter just yet, especially as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict smolders.” Tension in the Mideast has only intensified; nevertheless, Time of Favor plays March 16 and deserves a run of its own.
The movie is a seemingly incongruous mix of romance and zealotry slickly woven together by Cedar’s deft writing and filmmaking. Its star, Israeli heartthrob Aki Avni, plays Menachem, the commander of an independent military unit that regularly receives both solace and motivation from Rabbi Meltzer (Assi Dayan, the son of former Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan). In one service, the rabbi intones that war is abhorrent yet all soldiers’ private matters must be put aside in the fight for Israel. “A dead lion is more alive than a living dog,” he says, capturing in one Aesop-like phrase why young men and innocent bystanders will continue to die.
Menachem’s best friend, a brilliant scholar nicknamed Pini (Edan Alterman), has a jones for the rabbi’s daughter, Michal (a waifish actress named Tinkerbell). The rabbi believes Pini is perfect for his daughter, and his pressure on her feels ancient and arranged; she resists, and in one brutal putdown, her words wound him so much that he goes into diabetic shock in front of his peers. Soulful guy that he is, Menachem’s simultaneous attraction to Michal and love for Pini tears at his heart. Pini, stung by his pal’s betrayal as he watches Menachem and Michal warm to each other, has ideas of his own. He sets up Menachem as some sort of mad bomber when, in reality, it’s Pini’s finger on the trigger.
Meanwhile, Israeli officials are worried about the rabbi’s knack for whetting the bloodlust of his yeshiva students, many of whom are in Menachem’s unit. They believe that his piety has crossed over to fanaticism and that, as one stern official says, “he must be stopped.” But they’ve misinterpreted Rabbi Meltzer; he has not instructed his charges to blow up the Dome of the Rock Mosque on the Temple Mount — the holiest Islamic shrine in Jerusalem.
The damp caves beneath the mosque, filmed in a gorgeous blue tint, become the metaphor for centuries of gross misunderstandings. But the movie is less disturbing for its politics than for its affairs of the confused heart.
