A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

With no dialogue to distract him, he can see clearly not only the fakery of the main character who tries to pump up his manliness with a pen from the East, but the hollowness of the actor himself.

Is this what bothered him while they were making the film, so much so that he tried to disown it, despite its relative success? Could he actually sense that the charismatic young man who won Trigano over was morally damaged?

It wasn’t the man’s opinions or his smooth way with words that put Moses off. He was convinced that a man who believed in nothing could not, for all his cleverness and charm, penetrate the character of another human being and make it come alive. Moses refused to include the man again—“It’s him or me,” he told Trigano.

On the screen, the hour is late and the party is over, and on his motor scooter, the hero is giving a student, played by Ruth, a ride to her parents’ home in Jerusalem. At the door, he takes his leave with quick hugs and a cursory kiss, then continues on to his rented room in a house not far from the Old City, which in those pre-’67 days was off-limits, an object of longing. A bit tipsy, he undresses for bed, listening to an upbeat tune on a foreign radio station, and in his cozy pajamas, before going to sleep, he decides he wants to fondle the Indian pen one more time, take out the piece of parchment, perhaps decipher the message on the lips of the girl. But he discovers the pen has disappeared, and he searches for it frantically, but in vain. And instead of waiting till morning, he gives way to the panic that drives the plot and plunges him into the abyss.

Step by step, Trigano cleverly escalated the insane obsession. After the hero turns his room upside down, he gets dressed, grabs a flashlight, and returns to the cold empty streets he crisscrossed with the student. He walks slowly, inspecting the road and the sidewalks, ultimately arriving at the girl’s house, where he pounds on the door, wakes her parents, and insists that their daughter has pickpocketed his pen.

The search grows more delirious, and since the film’s hero, unlike the audience, doesn’t understand what the lost pen symbolizes, his madness becomes a tragicomic journey, offering glimpses of Israeli student life as each of his friends reacts to his behavior, some with anger and scorn, a few with compassion and readiness to help. Somehow this shoestring-budget film, eighty-five minutes long, evolved into a picaresque quest for the lost symbol, and Moses notices that despite the loony script, he made sure as director to maintain respect for the tormented character wallowing in humiliation, so as not to distance the audience from a man bent on surrender to obsession. But Trigano’s script failed to bring the film to the open and generous conclusion found in the greatest picaresque works. After the hero goes from student to student, trying vainly to discover who at that raucous party had secretly coveted his pen, he breaks into their apartments to search for his lost object. And since the inscrutable symbol has so deeply permeated the soul of the hero that the psychiatrist, who enters late in the film, cannot free him of the obsession, it’s only natural that the rigid, one-dimensional screenplay was given a radical ending that Trigano was unwilling to modify. And so, in the last scene, as the sun goes down, the hero lays his handsome head on a railroad track and waits.

The cheers at the end of the movie are more ardent and longer than at the previous screening, perhaps because of the young people in the crowd, while some of the older ones hurry to the exit before the lights go up. Ruth opens her bloodshot eyes and yawns. Moses wonders if there is any point to going onstage without the archive director at his side. The petite animation teacher who is to moderate will not be forceful enough to control the audience in discussing a film that contains a seed of perversion. He suggests combining this discussion with the one that is to follow the evening screening, especially since the railroad tracks that end the present film will open the next one.

Pilar appears relieved. She too is happy to avoid discussing a movie whose meaning is so obvious, and she hurries to the stage and announces the postponement of the discussion until the next screening. A few in the audience look disappointed; this time, many have wanted not only to ask questions but to attack. And Moses, who feels mildly guilty about avoiding the conversation, asks to attend the evening Mass conducted by the priest. For at the end of the retrospective, if he indeed decides to confess his professional sins to a film-savvy priest, he ought to know something about the confessor’s style of prayer.

It’s good to visit the little chapel where officers of the army barracks once prayed. In its modest way, its beauty and harmony are the equal of its mighty sister in Santiago. Hanging on the walls are pictures of beasts of prey of a sort not generally found in churches.

It’s crowded. The old people who just saw Obsession have come to purify themselves through evening prayer, and, who knows, maybe evening prayer in so charming a chapel is the actual purpose of their visit to the film institute. Juan de Viola wears a white robe and chants the liturgy in a pleasant voice, and from the yellowed marble altar, bedecked with wreaths of white roses, he nods his thanks to the Jews.

After the service, Moses expresses due admiration of the chapel and pleads with the priest to drop the idea of taking them to a fancy restaurant after the third movie. “Don’t strain your budget,” he says. “The fatigue and excitement of revisiting forgotten films will make it hard for us to focus on an expensive meal. We should eat early and satisfy our hunger with a quick hop to the cafeteria. We can postpone the banquet till tomorrow.”

Given no choice, Ruth agrees. During the break she slept on the sofa, and she napped in her seat during the screening, and she’s ready for fine restaurant food. But Moses knows that in a foreign city, with her poor English, she will have a hard time going without him.

The cafeteria is jammed. Have all these people come to see The Train and the Village ? Moses enters the self-service line and picks up a cheese sandwich wrapped in plastic. Ruth makes do with black coffee. Soon her character will propel the plot of a provocative film, and she is getting ready to encounter her old self.

THE WOODEN FLOOR of the big hall creaks, and the room is nearly full. Some of the elderly faces are familiar from the afternoon screenings; the number of younger viewers has grown, and middle-aged couples have arrived in groups from neighboring villages.

This time Moses takes no issue with the choice of film. He remembers this one and is confident in the quality of the plot and its execution. The Train and the Village, whose original Hebrew title was Distant Station, is the fourth film he made with Trigano. The idea for the film cropped up during the final shooting days of Obsession, as they were looking for railroad tracks they could film. They found a stretch of the track to Jerusalem, which in those days ran along the old border with Jordan, downhill from a divided Arab village. It was a picturesque section of the route, where the tracks made steep switchbacks on a rocky mountainside. The train from Jerusalem to the coastal plain passed through only twice a day, at a drowsy crawl, which meant they could march their desperate hero again and again between the iron tracks until they carefully balanced his head on one of them, found the proper angle, and shot several takes. It was clear that showing the severed head was taboo, so Trigano suggested ending the film with a close-up of a bloody, mangled jacket on the tracks, the missing pen glistening nearby in the moonlight. Moses, however, firmly rejected any improvised alteration of the original script. We have to respect the written word, and any change requires consensus, he said. Besides which, the planned ending, in which the train has not yet passed and only its faint whistle blast is heard in the distance, does not belittle the hero.