Brandon Judell
BROKEN WINGS THAT MEND
by Brandon Judell
One of Israel's most internationally acclaimed films, "Broken Wings" (Knafayim Shvurot), has landed on Manhattan. The winner of 9 Israeli Film Academy Awards, three more from the Berlin International Film Festival, plus the Tokyo Grand Prix, this family drama is now set to garner additional raves Stateside, and a few are already in.
J. Hoberman in The Village Voice insists this movie is "eloquent . . . and an auspicious debut." The Onion's Scott Tobias adds that this import bears "the mark of a great writer [in that] every character, minor or major, seems distinct and fully inhabited, to the point where it's easy to imagine them existing before the action starts, after it ends, and apart from any plot machinations at all."
Haifa-born director/writer Nir Bergman, 35, is the man responsible for all this celluloid infatuation. The story, instigated by his parents' divorce when he was ten, focuses on the Ullmans who are coping with grief. Nine months earlier, Dad, who was allergic to bees, got stung and died. Mom (renowned Israeli stage actress Orli Zilbershatz-Banai) slept for three months on unwashed sheets so she could be near his smell. Now she's back to being a midwife on the night shift. Seventeen-year-old Maya (Maya Maron) is in a rock group when she isn't baby-sitting for her younger, strong-willed siblings, Ido and Bahr. Maya's depressed twin, Yair (Nitai Gvirtz), is meanwhile giving out flyers while dressed in a mouse outfit. He's done so ever since he dropped out of school.
If grief wasn't enough, being poor isn't cheering up the Ullmans much either. Mom has to in fact push the family car to get it going. As for other luxuries, forget it.
What might strike some American viewers as odd is that in the film's eighty or so minutes, the Israeli/Arab conflict is never mentioned. Calling up Bergman in Los Angeles the other day, where he was promoting Broken Wings, he explained, "It has nothing to do with my personal view of the situation. The fact is that I made a film about a family. This doesn't mean that my thoughts are not on the peace process. You can think of Broken Wings as a statement saying something about the value of life and not politics.
"You know," Bergman, who lives in Tel Aviv with his girlfriend and two children, twins, continued, "usually when someone dies in an Israeli film, it will be as a consequence of the war. He will be a hero. I'm saying this family, these people coping, are my heroes right now. Just a small family trying to survive a normal day. You have to understand the economic situation right now in Israel. It is so bad that I guess that this is what's going to bring peace eventually. Why? Because people understand that this impossible economic situation is connected to what's happening in politics. The word on the street is that people are much more than ready for peace, and I guess it's from both sides."
Looking at an on-line photograph of the attractive director, it's easy to see that Bergman has used the equally attractive Yair as his on-screen spokesperson. Both physically and mentally they are perfect matches. Despondent and constantly spouting semi-absurd philosophical bon mots, Yair eventually finds salvation with a girl who has tried to commit suicide. There was such a girl in hisown life, Bergman admits, although he didn't sit nude on a window ledge with her as Yair does.
"The girl who cut her wrists was a girlfriend of a mine," he notes. "She did so because she was afraid she was afraid she was going to be like her parents. As I said, we weren't naked on the window, but we did some weird stuff in our time together."
Not surprisingly, the film that had a greatest influence on Bergman, the one that made him switch from photography to celluloid, was Robert Redford's Ordinary People, an ode to depression. "It influenced me, not only as a filmmaker but as a person," he insists. "When I was 16, I was already living on my own, and I saw it enormous times. So many times that when I became a filmmaker, I wanted to touch people in the way that film touched me." His other influences: Francois Truffaut, Mike Leigh, Krzysztof Kieslowski, and, of course, Ingmar Bergman.
But what really shaped this Bergman was his years with the Israeli Defense Forces. He was inducted in 1987. "Go into the army and you'll understand how my life was changed," Berman suggests. "I was carrying this philosophical way of thinking at the time, that our reality is not the real reality. I was influenced by Carlos Casteneda, his Don Juan, and P. D. Ouspensky. They all really say the same thing altogether, that we don't see reality as it is. But suddenly reality didn't care how I saw it. It was just there. Reality was agreeing with the whole army so I really had to grow up."
Stuck in communications with an officer that despised him, Bergman delved further into Casteneda's Don Juan. Getting a bit serious, Bergman recalls, "Don Juan said, 'To be a slave is a very good opportunity to grow from the inside, and what you got to do is become a perfect slave. But then do whatever you do with spirit and in an arty way. So I began to do that. I made myself the perfect slave. Everything that I had to do, I did with a free mind. Eventually it worked. My officer got off my back. Two years later, my girlfriend told me that she had actually just went to speak with him and told him if he's not off my back, she's going tell his wife about the affair that they had had. So that's a story about my reality of growing up in the army."
It's the one personal story that did not find its way into
"Broken Wings." Maybe in "Broken Wings 2."
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