A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

Trigano’s disappointment with Moses’ adamant refusal to decapitate his friend was apparently the inspiration for a new film, set entirely in the train station of a remote mountain village, in which the tight linkage of love and death would be crystal clear. And with these very words, eros and thanatos, Moses guides the audience to the symbolic heart of the movie they are about to see. Galicians not familiar with the Israel of the 1950s and 1960s and its sleepy local trains will not realize that a sleek, luxury express train — in too big a hurry to stop at a desolate mountain station, a train that races by each evening with sublime indifference and blind trust in a long bridge suspended over a deep abyss — is a product of pure fantasy. But according to the movie’s internal logic — reveals Moses, to de Viola’s chagrin — it is no wonder that, for the forgotten villagers, such a train inspires longing, helpless anger, and the desire to deal the indifferent world a dose of disaster and pity, to which end they must shunt the train from the main track to a rickety siding, causing it to plunge into the ravine below. De Viola interrupts and censors the translation to prevent giving away the ending, but Moses is swept up in his revelations and is explaining to the audience that the village they are about to see is in effect two villages in one, on both sides of a border, and the portion inside the kingdom of Jordan had to be filmed with a telescopic lens — at which point the priest tugs at his sleeve. “Come, my friend,” he whispers, virtually shoving him from the stage, “it would be a shame to ruin the viewing experience with unimportant detail.” The technician turns out the lights, and Moses has to feel for the step with his foot.

This was the first of their films that called for many extras to portray the villagers and the passengers on the train. In the past they had been able to draw on friends, and as backup they had members of Trigano’s family, eager to immortalize themselves but also genuinely excited by the scriptwriter’s ingenuity. This time they had to look for paid extras, young and middle-aged and a few elderly, and mold them into a frustrated community stewing in the humiliation dealt them by the speeding evening train, a village whose forbidden, repressed fantasy would be unleashed by a young woman, sitting now beside him, overwhelmed by emotion.

In a morning fog pierced by first light, the camera follows an old, creaking freight train, wearily twisting up a mountain track. Now and again, the camera skips to the tiny mountain station, where awaiting the train is the veteran stationmaster, wearing a cap with a brim and holding two signal flags, one red and folded in a downward position, and the other green and unfurled, which he will soon wave at the locomotive. Moses remembers the man. A dour-looking actor from the Yiddish theater, he accurately played the loyal and reliable official who would in the end be turned by wily villagers into the person solely responsible for a calculated act of terrible destruction.

Although Moses praised the actor for his nuanced portrayal of his character, he could barely get a word from the man about the movie’s plot. Let’s wait till it’s done, the actor would say, elegantly dodging the question, we’ll see how it all comes together. Moses could sense that this Holocaust survivor was repelled by the Israelis’ fanciful catastrophe, and by the time the editing was complete, Moses had lost contact with the actor, who did not show up at the premiere. It was impossible not to interpret his absence as dissociation from the film, and especially from what his character had been dragged into. Moses once saw him walking in the street, straight-backed and gloomy, dressed all in black, as if he were still playing the tragic character of stationmaster in a godforsaken mountain village. He considered approaching him and telling him the reviewers had praised his performance, but he feared provoking the wrath of a man who had been led astray by the young people of his village.

But now, in the dawning light of the film’s first moments, not only he but all the dreamers and deluders of the village, all the innocents and the inveiglers, do not yet know how they will fit into the story concocted by the scriptwriter. And while the locomotive of the freight train sways with the screeching of brakes as it braves the curving tracks, the stationmaster rushes to lean his weight on the railway switches — two metal levers constructed by the set designer to give the illusion that only when they are manipulated can the freight train diverge from the main track and come to a safe stop at the station. Toledano insisted on shooting the face of the engine driver — a real one, who was flustered by the film crew awaiting him at the station. The camera also follows two sleepy workers, who now speak fluent Spanish, as they jump from a dark railroad car and begin uprooting weeds between the tracks.

“Were they real railroad workers or extras?” Moses whispers to Ruth, who predictably doesn’t have an answer.

Moses puts an arm around her, gently strokes her hair.

The light brightens, and the village awakens to a routine day. Men leave their homes, children go to school, women do laundry in a small artificial spring built for the occasion to give the village a primitive feeling — everything flows so smoothly that even the dubbing seems natural to Moses.

“The Spanish you planted in my movies is starting to grow on me,” he whispers in Juan de Viola’s ear. “Who knows, I might be tempted to make my next film in Spain, maybe in Santiago.”

The priest’s face lights up. “For that possibility alone, the retrospective was worth the effort.” And in a surprising gesture of affection, he brings the director’s right hand to his lips for a gentle clerical kiss.

Meanwhile on the big screen, the freight train crawls ahead, sounding its whistle, and in the station house a new character awakens, the stationmaster’s assistant, a dreamy youth who will later turn out to be unreliable and perfidious. He emerges disheveled from a tangle of sheets, stands in his underwear by the window, and surveys the village streets through big military binoculars, spying on the girl he loves with all his heart.

“How and why have I forgotten his name?” Moses whispers to the woman at his side.

“Because he was a rotten son of a bitch.”

“Yes, but…”

“His name was Yakir.”

“That’s right, Yakir. What happened to him? Where’d he disappear to?”

“I thought he was killed in a war but unfortunately I got him mixed up with someone else. A few years ago I ran into him on the street, but I avoided him. After what he did to me in the film—”

“He was difficult…”

“For you he was difficult, for me he was horrible. This animal dragged me into the bushes in the last scene, and you let him do it. He was a despicable person who exploited the opportunity you gave him to humiliate me.”

“ I gave him?” Moses laughs. “Why me? I just followed the script.”

“But without pity… you didn’t spare me.” Ruth seethes as if they were discussing a scene to be reshot in a few minutes.

Moses tries to make light of it.

“Why should I be easy on a girl who charms the villagers to plunge an express train into a gorge just to attract a little attention from the world?”

“What do you mean, attention?” she protests. “You’re forgetting the empathy that we, the villagers, experienced, the compassion and concern, the devoted care we gave the injured passengers. That was my mission in the movie, all without speaking a word.”

“Without a word, how so? Look, here you are.”

Through the cinematic cunning of Toledano, who had the young man watch his loved one through binoculars — thus visually annexing the Jordanian half of the village — a girl appears on the screen, speaking with the village mayor in strange, jerky gestures.