The Retrospective: Translated From the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman (21 page)

“Yes, for such ceremonies one must fill the hall,” Juan says apologetically. “The value of the prize is diminished if the applause is feeble.”

“Believe me, my dear Juan, the prize is important to me even if its value is merely symbolic.”

“But this prize is not symbolic, it's real,” protests the priest, “even if it is awarded for films that are symbolic. Did the cultural attaché of your country not inform you? This is a prize of three thousand euros, and had my mother not been enlisted to contribute, the municipality, which suffers a continuous deficit, would have been hard-pressed to provide the sum.”

Moses turns red in the face. “Very generous of you, and moving. But I wonder if this is an award for merit, a consolation prize, or an award to encourage new projects.”

“Anything is possible,” says the priest. “When my mother gives you the envelope, she will explain the intention of the prize. She has told me nothing about what she plans to say.”

A light goes on in front of the screen, and Don Gomez Alfonso da Silva, small and grave, takes the stage.

“This is a serious man,” whispers Moses, “and though I don't understand what he says, I feel he speaks of me with generosity and appreciation.”

“With generosity, and also with anxiety about the continuation of your work. Last night he watched your film by himself and got so deeply involved, he woke me up and asked to be allowed a few words before the screening.”

“Meaning I don't need to give an introduction?”

“We'd be glad if you didn't, because we don't want to wear out an audience that is mainly not professional with too much intellectual talk.”

“Fine with me,” manages Moses, embarrassed.

“But in your words of thanks you can explain yourself at length in your mother tongue; my brother Manuel has volunteered to translate.”

“It would please me to speak in Hebrew. Anyway, what is your theoretician saying now?”

“He sees
The Refusal
as a transitional film in which the director relinquishes radical symbolism in favor of popular psychology.”

“Popular? Not really . . .”

“Don't be too upset. Don Gomez is truly erudite; over the years, he was married to three different women, and each wife sharpened his thinking. These women came from different parts of Spain, and today he mingles various dialects in his speech and invents original expressions and images that amuse the audience, especially the old people. See how they laugh and enjoy him.”

Moses wearily leans his head on the back of his chair. The sleepless night is taking its toll. He closes his eyes and calculates the number of hours that remain before the return flight to Israel.

W
HEN THE ISRAELI
lifts his head and opens his eyes, he finds that Don Gomez has faded into darkness, and projected onscreen is young Ruth, dressed in her high school uniform at her graduation ceremony. This film, like its predecessors, is dubbed in Spanish, but as opposed to the others, in which actions and locations were the principal elements, contextualized by the dialogue, here the drama develops mainly by means of long verbal exchanges that deepen the relationships among the characters. Moses remembers the draft pages of the screenplay, written in crowded longhand by Trigano, where speech followed speech, with no provocative slumber in a desert crater or moonstruck hallucination in a remote village. The characters in this film interact at a kitchen table, or in a corner of a neighborhood café, or in a bus station at the edge of the city. At the end of the film, the main character does not find a dramatic location to give birth to her child but chooses a small illicit clinic near the produce market in south Tel Aviv.

“So how can we infuse your story with the mystery you crave so much?” Moses had wondered aloud after he read the draft. But Trigano was unperturbed. “We'll look for that mystery in our next film, but now, after our defeat by Kafka's elderly animal, we must invigorate our image with a simple human story, for which we might find actors funded by the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption.”

And indeed he found them, and after many years they reappear on the screen of the auditorium of the municipality of Santiago de Compostela: a man and a woman, both about forty, who play a married couple, both teachers. With great affection they embrace the young graduate, singing her praises to her long-suffering, working-class mother, a resident of the south of Israel, who reverently tucks her daughter's precious certificate in her handbag.

The state paid the salaries of the actors playing the teachers and also provided a handsome grant to the production. Trigano tailored the fictional characters to the real ones. The pair were actors in the Hungarian theater, husband and wife, who escaped to Israel in the late 1950s after the failure of the Hungarian revolution. Their Jewishness was somewhat dubious, particularly the wife's, whose facial features and tall stature testified to remote Asiatic ancestry. Trigano used to call them “the two Khazars given us for free by the Ministry of Absorption.”

But where were these Khazars today? Where had they gone, how had they aged? They were a good deal older than Moses. But now in the dark, on the limp screen by the gorgeous fresco, they are young and active as they portray bits of their own biography.

As two artists who arrived in the country from behind the Iron Curtain, they enjoyed special treatment and spent considerable time in a Hebrew-language program to train them for performance in Israeli theater. But their Hungarian accents proved to be a formidable obstacle, and even the expert in pronunciation assigned them had a hard time inculcating emphasis on the proper syllables. True, in humorous skits, such an accent was an asset, especially when juxtaposed against speakers with the lilt of Arab lands, but the pair considered themselves serious stage actors and expected to play dramatic and tragic roles in the Jewish State. The Ministry of Absorption tried to find them employment at government expense in movies, where the soundtrack might be manipulated to impart the right meter to their Hebrew. To make it easier for Moses to cast the two in the new film, Trigano invented for the actor the role of a history teacher, turned his wife into a teacher of art, and instead of two refugees from the communist regime they were made into Holocaust survivors whose time in the death camps had rendered impossible their hopes for a child who would bring them consolation.

This is the point of departure for the drama that develops between the pair of teachers and the pretty and gifted student, daughter of an underprivileged family, to whom Trigano awarded the same scholarship he had received as a youth. And not just the scholarship. He also saw fit in the screenplay to grant his girlfriend the matriculation certificate of which she was deprived when he convinced her to drop out of school and become an actress in his films. And because, when the time came, he also persuaded her to declare that she was Orthodox in order to avoid military service, he made it up to her by turning her into an outstanding soldier who becomes an officer. All these compensations, which he showered upon her in his imagination to atone for his domination in real life, were still not enough for him, so he resurrected her mother, who had died in childbirth, and it is she who now fills the screen, a widow dressed in black, listening to the two Khazars who try to ingratiate themselves with her so she will not obstruct their secret plan.

“How is the teachers' Spanish?” Moses whispers to the director of the archive sitting beside him. “Is it correct?” “Not really,” he answers. “Trigano asked that their dubbing be given a foreign accent and the grammar sabotaged a little, and a Polish student who studied here last year showed the dubbers how to do it without making them sound ridiculous.” Indeed, the foreign accent and mistakes provoke no laughter in the municipal auditorium, which was also the case when the film was shown in Israel. From the start, the artful acting of the Khazars creates a mood of uneasiness.

The plan of the pair of teachers, the Holocaust survivors, is becoming clear. They've picked out the gifted student and try to convince her, as the film progresses, to give birth to a child they can adopt. After her graduation, they continue to cultivate their loving relationship.

Moses admits that the two played their parts professionally. In effect, they portrayed themselves and even subtly steered him and the cinematographer to bring out the best in them. It was no wonder that they were praised by critics and audiences alike, but after the partnership collapsed, there was no chance of persuading them to work again with Moses. Their loyalty was to Trigano.

In any case, the Spanish sounds alien to the spirit of his film. Some echo or other in the dubbing studio has amplified the artificiality of the speech. He removes his hearing aids, takes out their little batteries, and replaces them in his ears as plugs, to muffle the sound.

The Refusal
is a quiet film, centering not on the two teachers but rather on a strong, impressive young woman whose inner journey is complicated but credible. This time Trigano created a worthy character. He gave his girlfriend not only fortitude but moral fiber and sent her to serve in an army base not far from Jerusalem. On weekend leaves, she chooses not to make the long trip to her mother's home in the south but to stay with her former teachers, who have given her a room of her own in their apartment.

This is a drama of subterranean currents with lengthy close-ups, but still, the story unfolds steadily toward its goal. These two teachers know their student well, and from the time she arrived, in the tenth grade, a gifted girl from a poor town, they spotted her as a means to their own happiness. They are aware of her strong points and vulnerabilities, and cautiously, quietly, over breakfast and dinner, they will try to chart a path to her heart and to incline her toward granting their wish. They tell her about the war, show her pictures of the European world that was destroyed, photos of relatives and children lost. In precise, restrained language, without excessive pathos, they confess their barrenness. And the soldier, now an officer, slowly guesses what her former teachers want from her, pretending she doesn't while giving them hope.

Step by measured step, the story Trigano devised for his loved one moves ahead, doled out gradually, with no sharp turns, building the tacit agreement, repellent and scandalous but with a mission—to provide a child to those whose world was destroyed, a descendant who will not disappoint them, because they have faith in the Israeli womb that will give it life. This absurdity, in the skillful script, wins the approval of the lonely widow, the mother of the heroine, who accepts that her gifted child, before starting a family of her own, will bring happiness to others.

And so, in this old film, on a makeshift screen in the auditorium of the municipality of a foreign city, a young woman officer still serving in the army becomes pregnant. But now Trigano changes the game. She is not an innocent and confused girl who falls prey to the desire of others but a self-confident, sensual young woman who, to mask the identity of the father, switches lovers promiscuously. The passing of seasons, one of Moses' directorial specialties, is rendered in the slowly bulging belly of the young woman.

Trigano demanded the right to oversee the proper development of the pregnancy. He did not rely on the costumer or the makeup artist. In the breaks between filming he would lovingly rest his head on the soft pillow taped each morning to Ruth's belly. But, unlike Trigano, the military authorities are not overjoyed. They advise this valued officer to terminate the pregnancy, but she refuses and so is discharged from service. And instead of accepting the adoptive parents' invitation to move into their home and enjoy their care until the birth, she rents an apartment on the scruffy southern edge of Tel Aviv and waits there for her delivery date.

At this point, the mighty Israeli landscape enters the picture. Moses is struck by how Toledano's old camera managed to wrap wind, waves, and sky around the heavily pregnant woman as she walks on the beach. Here begins the turnabout in her mind, a reversal that Moses had to convey with few words and many silences. Slowly the meaning of the mission she has undertaken becomes clear to her: even after the child is handed over to its adoptive parents, she will always, as its mother, be tied to it. And not only to it, but to them. She, too, will have to bear the burden of their memories.

From now on, a new, painful recognition comes into focus, devised by Trigano for the ending of the film in keeping with his personal ideology. In Jerusalem, the two future adoptive parents are preparing for the imminent birth, their anxiety mingled with excitement, retaining an obstetrician and a veteran midwife, splurging on overpriced baby gear to pamper the newborn, while in Tel Aviv, the heroine is in touch with a local agency and is offering her unborn child for immediate, anonymous adoption.

And so, when the hour arrives, with no one by her side and without a word to anyone, she disappears behind the iron door of a semi-legal clinic, a door whose color Toledano requested be changed from green to blue.

Moses feels the suspense among the Spanish audience as the birth, filmed in a studio, draws near. Trigano demanded that this time he not be barred from the set and that he even take part in the directing. But the childbirth scene was cut out in the editing room, where it seemed crude and inconsistent with the spirit of the film. Ruth had screamed and writhed more than she'd been asked to, and the blood did not look realistic. The transfer of the newborn to the social worker was filmed in a real hospital, in the maternity wing. The infant, who was a week old, was loaned to the production by the sister-in-law of the soundman, but only on condition that she play the social worker receiving the child for adoption. And though the woman had never stood before a movie camera, she played her role so naturally that Ruth broke uncontrollably into real tears. Who knows better than Moses about all the fake tears he got out of her in subsequent films. He is amazed how genuine and pained was her weeping in this one, so much so that the screen seems to tremble.