A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

Only as the first images appear does the director realize that the color has vanished from his memory. He was sure this film was shot in black-and-white, and here it is in color. “Did you remember,” he tests the woman by his side, “it was in color?” “Of course,” she answers at once. “I loved this messy movie, I still think it’s one of the decent films you made, even if it went nowhere.”

“ Decent ?” He is thrown off by the word. “What do you mean, decent ?” “In other words, modest,” she whispers, putting a finger to his lips to hush him as the first bit of dialogue is spoken. Moses studies her with affection. The morning sleep did her good: color has returned to her cheeks, and the spark to her eyes. The link he imposed on her memory between Roman Charity by their bed and the film scene she refused in Jaffa seems not to trouble her. On the contrary, it revives her spirit. Will we, he wonders, in the limited time remaining here, find passion as well?

After three dubbed films he is used to the Spanish. Without understanding a word, he at least finds it natural on his actors’ lips. Ten men about forty years old, from cities and towns, factory workers and teachers and clerks, leave their families to go to an army camp and sign for weapons and equipment, because, after assuming they’d been forgotten, they were called up for reserve duty. With practiced hindsight, Moses zeroes in on the film’s weakness. The color erects a barrier between the realistic opening and the fantastical and hallucinatory things to come. Too much detail in the scenes showing the reservists leaving their homes, saying goodbye to wives and children, getting their equipment, telling jokes. A film that seeks to convey intimacy with soldiers who abandon their mission and spend long days in deep sleep must, from the start, go with shades of black, white, and gray alone, the colors of dream.

Sluggishly moving onscreen are older men, heavy and balding, who have not made peace with the reserve duty they have been dealt. Slack-shouldered and befuddled, they shed civilian clothes and put on old uniforms, examine with revulsion the gear and weapons from the past war, and shake years of dust from army blankets, and the director wonders if in these opening scenes, one can already see the seeds of his obsessive attention to detail. He recalls that he intended to ask the actors to improvise freely before the camera, drawing on their experience as reserve soldiers. But Trigano stood firm, fiercely defending his script: Only what is written will be spoken, with nothing added.

Was the quick transition from colorful city scenes to the monotonous yellow desert detrimental to the film? In a very long shot, the small truck carrying the reservists looks like an ant inching into a pothole on a heat-bleached road. It cautiously makes its way down the slope of a small crater to an ancient Nabataean ruin, which the cameraman and set designer came upon when scouting locations. To convert it into a military installation whose nature and purpose no one could guess, they wrapped it in shiny silver sheets, adding a profusion of colorful cables that suggested a giant prehistoric beetle. To ensure the site’s safety and security, the reservists get down from the truck and go to work, unloading cartons of field rations, setting up the water tank towed by the truck in a patch of shade under a desert bush. Since their longtime commander is late to arrive, a replacement is designated at the last moment, a minor bureaucrat in civilian life who spreads a blanket on the ground and goes to sleep.

In light of the film’s failure at the box office and the disappointment among more than a few of the director’s friends, Moses now asks himself why he had not insisted that the screenwriter strengthen the film with a solid plot, beyond the provocative allegory of slumber at a secret military installation. But now that history has debunked the illusion of peace, a group of soldiers who slumber with a clear conscience in front of a vital military installation is a strong image, at least for the director who considers it anew at a screening in a distant land.

Moses insisted that the reservists in the film all be amateur actors, and he recruited them himself from local drama clubs, preferring men who had served in combat units and knew their ways, so their sleep would make a strong, realistic impression. Right now they’re examining the installation, which they must guard without ever being told what it is, and as they ponder its purpose they also prepare for their first night under the stars and light a campfire.

It’s quite likely, Moses muses, that some of these amateurs, who were then ten or fifteen years older than he was, have since died, and those who are still alive may or may not remember the bizarre movie that must have frustrated them when it became clear that the script afforded no gripping conflict or complex situations, no opportunity to hone their acting skills, that it merely demanded their presence, day after day, night after night, in front of a camera that absorbed their slumber. Like actual reservists, they left work and family, agreeing to go down to the desert without pay for a few days of shooting, and now they were asked merely to act fatigued. He and the cinematographer had tried to cover up the feeble plot with flames and flying sparks and faces flickering in the silver cover of the installation, along with unforgettable shots of the desert by day and by night. Will this audience appreciate their beauty?

Moses attempts to assess the reaction of the few viewers scattered among the rows of seats. True, he does not yet hear whispering, coughing, or fidgeting, but he assumes the audience will be indifferent to this film and perhaps hostile. He steals a glance at Ruth, whose eyes are fixed on the screen in anticipation of her entrance as an elusive Bedouin woman, dressed in black and wearing a veil, spying on the sleeping soldiers. After Ruth’s impressive role as a deaf-mute in Distant Station, Trigano was tempted to bestow a new disability on his beloved, making her lame or even blind, but Moses vetoed it and they compromised on a veiled Bedouin woman who slips through the night like a ghost.

THE BOND BETWEEN the scriptwriter and his beloved grew stronger during the shoot in the desert. Since they knew each other from childhood, their relationship had earlier resembled love between cousins, but after the success of Distant Station they came to believe that their partnership also involved an artistic mission, and the fact that a former teacher had made it a reality heightened their self-importance, and their love as well. And so, during the filming of Slumbering Soldiers, Trigano never once left the location, yet he made sure not to intervene in the directing or cinematography, for he knew that everyone, by the terms of the agreement, would be faithful to his script. But at night, when cast and crew rolled up the silver sheeting and went to sleep inside the ancient Nabataean structure, the screenwriter and actress would disappear with their sleeping bags behind a nearby hill, their laughter echoing within earshot.

But the little screen at the film institute doesn’t feature broken memories, only an old movie driven by its own obsessions. The melancholy moon, whose countenance Toledano managed to capture on the silvery cover of the installation, whitens the faces of the reservists, grown men who nibble the leftovers of their meal before spreading their sleeping bags on the ground and zipping them closed in a way that makes it possible for the camera to move from soldier to soldier. Even the guards who are to patrol the premises are too lazy to leave the campfire. Their conversation dies down, their eyes gradually close. And then, at the top of the crater, appears the thin silhouette of the Bedouin woman, who moves silently as if moonstruck. And for the first time in the film — which so far has been free of background music — the sound of a flute, which from now on will accompany the performance of the veiled woman in black.