Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer
The fourth feature film by Israeli director Nadav Lapid is an imaginatively directed psychodrama about a director’s artistic and emotional crisis in the tradition of “8 1/2,” “All That Jazz,” “Day for Night” or “Contempt.”
I know that’s a simplistic and purely imitative description to have at the top of a review, but it’s not intended that way. “Ahed’s Knee” is a fascinating movie that avoids most complaints of having nothing to say by having its characters wrestle with articulating free-floating anxieties about many things. It is also very stylish.
“Ahed’s Knee” observes an arrogant artist as he moves through the world and into his own psyche. The script’s fixation on the life and personal troubles of this character, who is called only Y (Avshalom Pollak), is an adhesive, bringing together what might otherwise seem like a bag of half-formed political observations and quasi-poetic meditations on Israel, Israelis’ relationship with Palestinians and Syrians, the topography of Israeli desert landscapes (which are so vividly envisioned here they seem to throb with their own life).
Y works on a video installation inspired in part by the story of a Palestinian teenaged girl who was imprisoned for slapping an Israeli soldier. Then he attends a screening of one of his movies at a library in an isolated desert community, where his contact person is Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a beautiful young woman who organized the event because she loves Y’s work. Unfortunately for Y, Yahalom also works for Israel’s ministry of culture, which according to Y decides “which books and plays are shown in Israel, and which writers, directors or artists appear [in public] or stay home,” thus governing their creative lives as well as financial ones.
You’d think this would make more out of that last thing than it does; but there’s a lot going on here. And it all comes back to Y, who is our guide through the tale and sometimes “narrates” it in first person by talking over images that are flashbacks to Y’s past, or fantasies or stray thoughts he has in the moment. Sometimes the movie puts us in Y’s head by using the camera to show us what he’s looking at, from wherever he happens to be standing or sitting.
Lapid, who has a confident, expressive and always evolving visual style, employs a new technique here: He starts a handheld shot with a closeup of the hero thinking or looking, then whips it over to another character (usually seen in closeup), a significant object (also seen in closeup) or some generalized phenomenon that his director’s eye finds interesting such as the way pavement becomes a grey blur as you’re driving on road.
These “point of view” shots are typically angled in a way that lets us know we’re seeing through Y’s eyes; but when the shot finally returns to Y again, we’re still looking at him. It’s like when an omniscient novel switches from third-person to first-person and back again.
In the middle of the movie there is a very long part where Y tells Yahalom about a disturbing thing that happened to him while he was in the army during the war with Syria: his unit was taught to swallow cyanide capsules instead of being taken prisoner and tortured. The lighting and camerawork here, in these “flashbacks,” are different from the rest of the film so much so that you might wonder whose mind we’re in: possibly that of Yahalom, who’s listening.
This would mean that the movie is so confident in its all over the place ness that it feels authorized to go inside characters other than its hero, then return us from whence we came. (Cinematographer Shai Goldman and editor Nili Feller, both brilliant, amplify beauty while preventing proverbial wheels from falling off wagon.)
Y tries to prove (to others? himself?) that he’s always the most interesting person in any room by being manic, motor-mouthed and diva-esque. Some of this is shot by Lapid so as to resemble a toddler sulking after being told no. There could be a self-critique buried somewhere in this character; Pollak plays him with an understated entitlement bordering on scary. For all his gifts, Y often comes across like a student who saw 8 1/2 at an impressionable age and decided he could be as cool as Marcello Mastroianni especially if he got those sunglasses (see photo atop review).
Y’s war story is like a mixture of two works, “The Human Condition” by Andre Malraux and “The Guest” by Albert Camus. However, many plot points in “Ahed’s Knee” don’t play out the way they’re expected to like the relationship between Y and Yahalom, which advances through so many shots of the actors’ faces being so close that you expect them to start making out (though there is a throwaway line from Yahalom suggesting that she thinks it was filched from a novel, but is too respectful of his distress than to say so outright).
Really, “Ahed’s Knee” is less of a story than a vibe (to paraphrase a line from “The Limey”) but what a vibe it is. There is only one fully developed character: the director. This keeps it from being an all-time classic; even such self-infatuated impresarios as Fellini, Truffaut, Fosse and Godard surrounded their self-absorbed leads with lively secondary figures who seemed to have lives when they weren’t onscreen.
But you can’t say this director didn’t do it this way on purpose. Y sees others as means to ends. Even when he’s pretending to be sensitive and listen well, he’s still just a culture vulture seeking productive-offbeat-experience fodder.
More than one sequence breaks away from the movie’s tough gritty international indie flick version of “reality” stylistic baseline and becomes as glossily visceral as any Michael Bay action film (e.g., the opening motorcycle ride down rainy highways and streets, with huge flat raindrops quivering ion the camera’s lens).
Others use needle-drop music cues to transition into surreal “music videos” or impromptu dance numbers; heck, sometimes it seems like the whole movie is dancing. It’s fun watching even at its most disturbing, and never funnier than when its hero seems mortified by the possibility that his own troubles aren’t the center of the universe.
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