A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

From the toxic black smoke belched by the bus emerges the name of the director, Yair Moses, also in Spanish transliteration; it is towed behind the Chausson as it pulls into the old central station. Moses is wondering if it was he who decided to stretch the screen time of his credit or if the Spanish film editor took it upon himself to immortalize the director’s name until the first passengers exit the bus.

And now he senses that the woman who sits beside him in the dark does not recognize herself in the village girl wearing the flowered mini-dress and straw hat and clasping a cardboard suitcase to her chest as she makes her way out of the bus station. He whispers, “See what a cute dress we picked out for you,” and she seems puzzled. But then a jolt of memory prevails, and she watches her character approaching passersby, asking directions in a voice not her own in a foreign tongue, and she turns to Moses, half smiling, half panicked.

Who would have thought that such an ancient film would be dubbed in Spanish, the Hebrew soundtrack a dim echo in the background? “What can we do about this?” he whispers to the archive director sitting to his right. “I can’t explain a film if I can’t understand a word that’s spoken.” “Of course you can,” the priest says to calm him, “it’s still your film, and even if you can’t recall the dialogue, you’ll be able to recognize the thrust of the film. And besides, my friend”—he touches the guest on the knee—“although the film you made at the beginning of your career may seem naive or primitive to you now, it nevertheless contains religious truth. It was not by accident that we chose it to open your retrospective.”

The words religious truth put Moses oddly at ease. Yes, why not? Perhaps it’s when you skip the dialogue that forgotten details of directing and cinematography come to light. He settles comfortably into his chair and grins at Ruth, who, having recognized her youthful self, leans eagerly forward, as if to embrace it. It is now clear that owing to its flimsy plot, the film will unfold at a snail’s pace and give its heroine plenty of time to reach her destination. But walking is not easy. She keeps shifting her suitcase from hand to hand; suitcases in those days did not have wheels, and Moses insisted that suitcases carried by his characters not be empty, to heighten the authenticity of the act. Toledano’s loving camera clings to the village girl who makes her way through the divided Jerusalem of the sixties — a provincial city but content within its clear boundaries, so that even an ugly concrete wall stuck in the middle of a street to mark a border between two countries doesn’t perturb the young woman walking by, accompanied by soft music. She pauses to read the Hebrew street signs, asking directions in Spanish. Moses takes note of inventive camera angles and interesting bits of montage that offer images of Jerusalem before the Six-Day War, including streets and buildings that no longer exist and vacant sites built up in later years, like the field where the president’s house went up; it is virgin land in this old film, strewn with rocks and thistles.

The young woman descends the steps of a stone house and rings the doorbell, and Moses is shocked to discover himself opening the door — a thin young man with wild hair, naked to the waist, a pipe in his mouth. The priest casts him an impish glance. Yes, it’s me, nods the director, who hopes, but is far from sure, that this was the only time he cast himself in a film, since the shift from one side of the camera to the other undermines his control and authority. But in this beginner’s film his acting part was small and brief, and the Spanish voice they’ve given him sounds more like yelling. He thinks of asking de Viola to tell him what he is saying, but the priest is glued to the screen, and Moses doesn’t want to break the spell.

Yes, even without the dubbed dialogue, it’s clear that the careless young man knows the visitor on his doorstep and doesn’t deny his promise to put her up at his house. Except someone got there before her, a woman emerging now from the bedroom in a flimsy bathrobe, a tenant, a lover, and the hostile look she shoots at the newcomer stops the girl cold. Humiliation and confusion flush her face, enhancing its beauty. Which is perhaps why the young man shows signs of doubt and regret, opens the door wide for the village girl to enter, and carries her suitcase into the hallway, and it seems this will be a story about two girls in a rented apartment, competing for the kindness of a mixed-up young man. But the lodger in the skimpy robe is unwilling to share her rights. She sends the young man to get the visitor a glass of water, and when he is gone a conversation ensues between the two women, of which Moses cannot recollect a word, but whatever is said, it is strong enough to convince the guest to give up her claim, enabling the screenwriter to derail the plot from a banal story into a strange and different one, a story that will struggle to be meaningful and credible.

Moses’ performance is not over. As penance for breaking his promise to the girl, he carries her heavy suitcase in the harsh white Jerusalem light that Toledano favored in their early days, failing to understand how many subtle and important details he was bleaching out.

To rest his arms, the young man places the suitcase on his head, taking a few hesitant steps that suggest, at least in the mind of the director, that he regrets that the extra room in his flat was not saved for this attractive young woman but rented instead to a bony, depressive tenant. Moses is shaken at the sight of his childhood street on the Spanish screen, and of his parents’ house, with some of its furnishings removed to give the camera room to maneuver.

“Wasn’t that your mother?” whispers Ruth as the camera slowly closes in on the woman of the house, indeed his mother, an impromptu actress in her own living room, which thanks to camera angles has never looked larger.

In the 1960s, his mother took early retirement from public service so that her husband could be promoted into her job, and the free time tempted her to take part in her son’s directing adventure, first by reading the script and suggesting minor changes, then by persuading Moses’ father to offer their house as a filming location. In those years, the filmmakers preferred to cast amateurs, not merely to save money but also because professionals who’d been trained as stage actors were prone to theatrical excess. Perhaps out of gratitude to his mother for turning her house into a set for a dubious movie project, Moses gave her a part in the film. His mother rose to the adventure over the objections of his nervous father, and the opportunity provided by her son to become a fictional character added joy and excitement to the last years of her life.

A long time has passed since her death, yet it pains Moses that Trigano’s script aged his mother beyond her actual years. They not only whitened her hair but also added wrinkles to her face that he is sure had never been there before. Yet she retains the wise humanity of a lonely old woman who offers shelter to a confused young woman in exchange for housework and personal services. This, as the film progresses, will prompt the old woman to evolve from a recipient of care into a caregiver, an angel of mercy for a woman more impaired than she is. Through the convolutions of the plot, that woman, despite her disabilities, will herself come to the aid of a dying man, who will assume a mission of his own and with superhuman effort postpone his death. With the remnants of his strength he will drag himself at night to a shabby cafeteria in the empty bus station, not to sip the last drink of his life, but to lift the spirits of the village girl who had come to the capital filled with hope and who now waits for the first bus to get her out of there.