Ahed’s Knee

Ahed’s Knee

Nadav Lapid’s fourth feature is a psychodrama about a filmmaker in the midst of an artistic and emotional crisis, made in the tradition of such self-obsessed auteurist classics as “8 1/2,” “All That Jazz,” “Day for Night” and “Contempt.” That may sound reductive and derivative, especially this early in a review; however, it’s not meant that way. “Ahed’s Knee” is a fascinating movie that avoids most accusations of having nothing to say by showing its characters grappling with articulating free-floating anxieties about many things. It’s also really cool-looking.

“Ahed’s Knee” follows an arrogant but talented artist as he navigates through life and probes his own mind. The script centers the director identified only as Y (Avshalom Pollak) his existence, personality and problems serving as a kind of glue that brings together what might otherwise be a bag of semi-formed political observations and quasi poetic reflections on Israel, its people, their relationship with Palestinians & Syrians, plus the topography of Israeli desert landscapes (which are so vividly realized here they seem to throb with their own life force).

Y works on a video installation inspired in part by the story of Ahed Tamimi, the Palestinian teenager who was imprisoned for slapping an Israeli soldier. He also goes to a library screening of one of his movies in some isolated desert community where Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a beautiful young woman who organized the event because she loves Y’s films but unfortunately for him also happens to work at Israel’s ministry of culture (an outfit which determines “what books and plays are shown in Israel, and which writers, directors or artists appear [in public] or stay home,” thus controlling their creative lives as well as financial ones, according to Y).

You’d think “Ahed’s Knee” would make more of that last thing than it ultimately does, but it’s a rich film. Everything circles back to Y, who leads us through the story and sometimes “narrates” it in first person by talking over images that represent flashbacks to Y’s past or fantasies or stray thoughts he’s having in the present moment. Sometimes the movie lets us into Y’s mind by showing us what he sees out of his eyes, from wherever he happens to be standing or sitting.

Lapid who has a confident, expressive and ever-evolving visual style does something here that feels new: He’ll begin a handheld shot with a closeup of the hero thinking/looking, then whip-pan over to another character looking/thinking, or some object or phenomenon that catches his director’s eye (such as pavement becoming a grey blur as you’re driving on a road). These “POV” shots are typically angled so that they suggest we’re seeing through Y’s eyes; but when the shot finally returns back to him, we see him again. It’s like when an omniscient novel switches from third-person to first-person and back.

In the center of the film, there is also a very long sequence where Y is talking to Yahalom about an experience he had in the army when they were at war with Syria: his unit was told to swallow cyanide capsules so that they wouldn’t reveal anything under torture if taken prisoner. The lighting and camerawork in these “flashbacks” are different enough from the rest of the movie that you could wonder whose mind we’re in maybe Yahalom’s as listener.

This would mean that the film has such faith in its all over the place method that it can get inside anyone’s head besides the hero’s, then send us back where we came from. (Cinematographer Shai Goldman and editor Nili Feller, both brilliant, keep adding beauty without letting proverbial wheels fall off of anything.)

Y convinces himself (and occasionally others) that he’s always the most interesting person in any room by acting crazy, talking nonstop and being a diva. Lapid shows that he knows how annoying Y can be by filming some of his antics like a toddler pouting after being told no. There may be self-critique here too; Pollak plays him as a kind of quietly smoldering entitlement. For all his gifts, though, there are times when Y feels like a student who saw “8 1/2” way too young and thought he could be as cool as Marcello Mastroianni if only he had the right sunglasses (see photo atop this review).

The middle part of the war story of Y is like a combination of two works of fiction: “The Human Condition” by Andre Malraux and “The Guest” by Albert Camus. However, this incident, like many other events in “Ahed’s Knee for example, in one shot after another that comes so close to them making out between Y and Yahalom does not work as expected. (Also, Yahalom has a throwaway line suggesting she thinks it was stolen from a novel but respects Y’s pain too much to say so outright.)

In general terms, to quote “The Limey,” “Ahed’s Knee” is more of a vibe than a story but what a vibe! Really, there is only one developed character in the film: the director. This keeps it from being an all-time great; even self-obsessed impresarios like Godard surrounded their narcissistic leads with lively secondary figures who appeared to have lives when they weren’t on camera.

But still you can’t say he didn’t do it on purpose this way. Y is somebody who uses others as means to ends; even when he affects sensitivity or plays at being a good listener, he remains a culture vulture seeking interesting images and salable pitches among other people’s experiences.

Several sequences break away from the movie’s usual tough gritty international indie flick version of “reality” and go as glossily visceral as Michael Bay action films (e.g., the opening motorcycle ride down rain-soaked highways and streets with huge flat raindrops quivering ion the camera’s lens). Other sequences use needle drop music cues to set up surreal “music videos” or impromptu dance numbers.

The whole movie dances. It is funniest when its hero seems horrified by the thought that his own problems might not be at center stage and most enjoyable when it is least disturbing.

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