A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

WHEN HE OPENS his eyes, the smoke and the campfire and the installation and the soldiers have disappeared. The desert too has faded, and night is replaced by a strong afternoon sun as an airplane lands at the tiny airport of Tel Aviv. In a quick series of shots, the commander comes into view, a vigorous man about fifty with graying hair who projects authority as he returns in his private plane from a business trip abroad. Moses smiles to himself as he recognizes the head of the village from Distant Station, and he suddenly recalls the name of the actor: Shlomo Fuchs, known to everyone as Foxy, no longer among the living. Yesterday he convincingly collaborated in plunging a passenger train into an abyss, and today he will play a more complicated part that entangles him in a hasty killing.

His wife does not seem at all happy to have him home, as written in the script or perhaps as embellished by the actress. The moment he enters, she hands him the reserve call-up notice that arrived in his absence, as if urging him to perform a duty to the nation before he begins to pester her and impose order in the household. After a quick lunch with his grown children, the new protagonist does not further impede the plot; he readies himself to go down to the desert and join his soldiers.

The montage is brisk but believable. In his bedroom he puts on his uniform and straightens his officer’s stripes. From under the double bed he pulls out a submachine gun and a kit filled with black magazines, and he is ready and able, as always, to go to battle.

It was the cinematographer and not the writer who called for the commander to drive himself to the desert in an army jeep with no doors or roof, enabling the camera to follow him from far and near, emphasizing the loneliness of the authority figure as he aims to end the anarchy. As close-ups of a determined brow and silvery locks tossing in the wind are intercut with long shots of a green jeep meandering among desert cliffs, the commander nears the remote crater, and Moses can feel that the jeep’s journey in daylight and darkness, taking no more than a minute of screen time, has aroused expectation in the hall, mingled with vague trepidation. But he also remembers how Toledano tortured them for hours to get that one pure minute, how he repositioned the crew again and again around the jeep, which at one point broke down, and how he kept switching lenses and angles, waiting for changes in the light and movements of the clouds, all to make his visual dream come true.

The jeep descends silently, headlights off, into the crater, where the installation flickers with reflections of a dying campfire. The commander does not confront the peacefully slumbering guards or try to wake his troops, but rather strolls through the little encampment lost in thoughts and plans, surveying the surrounding cliffs and making mental notes of lookout points, a suitable location for a firing range, hillsides for combat exercises, an open space for lineups. It is only when he climbs on a rock to find a place for his soldiers to practice digging trenches that he catches sight of a thin black figure watching him from afar.

The one soldier he finally wakes up is the bugler, who henceforth will accompany him with staccato blasts. All of a sudden the slow, quiet film is filled with loud speech and urgent action. Commands, shouts, complaints, laughter, and cursing whose rapid dubbing in Spanish reminds Moses of Italian movies about World War II. On top of guard duty, training exercises, and nighttime lineups, the screen is gradually dominated by the relationship between the older commander and the young Berber.

Despite the discipline and order imposed by the commander, the young woman continues her visits, as if she too has a stake in the installation. And despite the commander’s strict order to banish her, she manages to outwit the guards and slip close again and again. But unlike the guards, who were indifferent to her presence and never bothered to interrogate her, the commander grows increasingly angry over her nightly appearances, and since he himself has no idea what sort of installation he is guarding, he assumes that she knows nothing about it either, that her stubborn visits at night are only meant to demonstrate that she is an equal partner of the Jews, an ally in ignorance. The commander decides to eradicate this presumptuous partnership at its root.

Trigano’s intention to end the film with the killing of the young woman worried Moses. If you have a mature citizen, a family man and successful businessman, called up for a short stint of reserve duty and thrust into a situation of no clear and present danger, he said to Trigano, it will take an extreme directorial feat to convince an audience that his murderous rage is believable. But Trigano would not give up on the death of his Berber. Only after their final breakup did Moses understand that it was probably the writer’s great love for Ruth that impelled him to drag her in his scripts into situations of loss and humiliation, so the evil realized on the screen would return to real life drained of vitality, which was his way of protecting her. Meanwhile, between scenes, a unique friendship developed between the two lovers and Foxy, whom the scriptwriter and the actress fondly dubbed the “killer officer.”

With a pang of discomfort, Moses watches two members of the audience slipping sheepishly out of the hall. True enough, he wasn’t sure whether to stage the murder at night or by day, or whether the girl should be aware of the threat or remain proud and aloof until the moment she died. And the fatal shot — should it be at close range or from far away? Should she die theatrically, or should he make do with a modest bloodstain on her garment? Trigano began to make suggestions, but Moses objected to his interference and in the end banned him from the filming of the scene. “Just as I don’t hover over your desk when you’re writing, I don’t want you standing behind the camera while I’m directing,” he told him firmly.

Did the cinematographer’s fervor for Ruth also render the director suspect in her lover’s eyes? The cameraman and his assistant pleaded with Moses to keep the scriptwriter at a distance, as “his wiseass intellectualism will only trip us up.” But in the Spanish screening room, in the company of maybe a dozen foreign viewers, Moses can suddenly feel the pain his young collaborator suffered when he was prevented from witnessing his loved one’s murder.

“We’ll tie you up at dawn on a cliff,” said the cameraman to the actress, “but in your death you’ll be even more beautiful than in life.” Indeed, on the day before the filming, the cinematographer climbed onto an east-facing cliff just before sunrise to check the light from every angle. The following evening, he sent his assistant and the soundman up with the equipment. In the dead of night he led the two actors and the director to the spot, and there applied makeup, his own concoction, to the actress and waited for the glimmer of dawn to illuminate the contours of her face, which would appear uncovered for the first time when the impact of the bullet to her heart knocked off her veil.

All the scenes leading to this one had already been shot: the repeated expulsions of the Bedouin woman from the installation, the rebukes and warnings, including a forced march back to her family’s encampment. Her father had warned and threatened her and would have also tied her up, except he knew she would escape and return to the Israeli watchmen, believing that she too belonged at the secret installation.

The final pursuit of the Bedouin girl by the officer had been filmed over and over, in daytime and at night, leaving only the final showdown on the rim of a cliff — a respectable citizen, an angry and exhausted commander, versus a young and delicate but strong-minded woman, whose joyful laughter now heightens the screen. Moses knows this laughter was not in the original script but was born of his inspiration. Laughter meant to trigger the rage of the officer, who apparently imagines that the woman is trying to seduce him and fears that he might succumb to the passion of this desert creature. He pulls the pistol from his pocket and fires in the air, but the laughter, free and young and mocking, demands another bullet to silence it, and a third bullet so the actress, persuasive and credible in her pain and collapse, will not rise again.