39 Pounds of Love

39 Pounds of Love

“I just pray I live long enough to achieve my dreams,” Ankilewitz tells us. The same goes for everyone, and we also don’t want to die then. We want to sit around for years because they have been achieved. The documentary “39 Pounds of Love” has three Ami’s dreams; they are To win the love of his caregiver Christina, visit America in search of his brother as well as find that doctor who said he would not survive.

Christina is a beautiful Romanian girl who is in her early twenties and lifts up Ami from his bath with such ease that it scares him. “She’s gorgeous, she is young, she is alive,” says Ami speaking through a Madonna style microphone that magnifies his delicate voice. “There is nothing else I want more on this planet than being with her.” She loves him but not the love between two lovers. And thus he sends her away by saying, “I can’t go on like this. Just tell her to go out of the house.” She leaves.

Ami now plans his trip to America despite the strong advice from his mother Helene against going since he will not be able to withstand the journey. But Ami insists and asks Asaf, his best friend and former caretaker plus Dani Menkin- this film’s director; there might be other crew members whom we don’t see too.

They rent a van and head back home in Texas where their brother lives for a meet up with the brother. In Santa Fe he visits an alleged miracle-working church where no miracles take place or seem likely to happen or even ever happened at any time before now. A motorcycle gang lets him fulfill one lifelong dream: He sits on a sidecar while riding a Harley Davidson; there is an image of wind blowing through hair and smile on face. At Grand Canyon, Ami faints away only for him to be taken away in an ambulance.

Eventually, he meets Dr. Albert Cordova, who is elderly and confused, and explains to him that he was the child who should have died by the age of six but instead lived on to 34 as well as telling him not to be so smug about his predictions for a future. The doctor does not speak throughout this conversation except when there is a close up of his face which then he looks into ami’s eyes and tells him how good it is that he has lived long.

These are the materials for a touching documentary, but that’s what they feel like: The materials, so arranged as to suggest questions that undermine the effect of the film. We know most documentaries involve some casual rearrangements of reality and certain occurrences happen because of cameras observing them at least to some extent. However, “39 Pounds of Love” feels too tightly controlled at times and raises fundamental issues it doesn’t even attempt answering.

Ami is protesting his love for Christina, who replies to him and he dismisses her with a wave of his hand. These three events were already predetermined before they took place before the camera lens. “When did you first realize you were so different?” He was asked, and answered simply, “When Christina walked out the door.”

What!? So such happened just as recently as this movie’s events? For instance, in most documentaries there exists an indescribable smell of something real going on right now. On the other hand, in this documentary film one gets to feel that Ami knew already that Christina will walk away even before he says I love you; and she had left even earlier than we see her leave.

However, here comes also best friend a former caretaker who should accompany us to America. But has Asaf come along only as Ami’s closest friend or yet again been hired as a caretaker in order for this film to be made? This implies that the brother has been ostracized from his family (there is another brother somewhere else who never appears in the film plus Mexican mother’s Israeli ex-husband whom nobody talks about).

But when Ami’s brother emerges from his American house it is for joyful re-union. Was the estrangement settled offscreen? Why did it occur at all? Has anyone ever thought among Israelis how strange could be watching someone like Ami riding on Harley Davidson sidecar?

Poor Dr.Cordova seems caught off-guard by his appearance and there is some confusion in the film whether this man has anything to do with dire’s prediction concerning Ami.

These are questions about what we see. More confusing are those that concern what we don’t see. And after Ami falls down and ambulance takes him away what happens afterwards? How much time goes by prior to Cordova visit? Did any risk exist?. Was their visit cut short in America? The film itself is really cut; it ends in 70 minutes without any closure scenes of Ami returning home; this is just a sudden ending that’s followed immediately by credits when according to everything we know about storytelling there should have been closure scenes.

Where is Ami today? How does he feel about his journey? Isn’t it strange that we don’t see him coming back home? Was the homecoming scene not captured on film or was it sad? “The trip is not going to end well,” warned a friend before they even embarked. Any experienced documentarian watching this film would be mentally cataloguing the missing scenes, knowing full well that without them, as “we don’t have a movie.”.

In no way do I mean to take away anything from Ami Ankilewitz’s bravery and will power. His life has been exceptional. But he has been ill-served by his filmmakers. Having been consigned by chance to a body still growing, yet an undeveloped motion picture for unexplained reasons made him its victim.

The fact that “39 Pounds of Love” was on the short list for best documentary Oscar shows either that the people who made up this list did not understand what makes up documentaries or possibly they were saluting Ami rather than his movie. That this got into theaters while Herzog’s other film Grizzly Man didn’t go through makes one think of corruption in judgment if not scandalous conduct ?

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