A. Yehoshua - The Retrospective

Trigano demanded the right to oversee the proper development of the pregnancy. He did not rely on the costumer or the makeup artist. In the breaks between filming he would lovingly rest his head on the soft pillow taped each morning to Ruth’s belly. But, unlike Trigano, the military authorities are not overjoyed. They advise this valued officer to terminate the pregnancy, but she refuses and so is discharged from service. And instead of accepting the adoptive parents’ invitation to move into their home and enjoy their care until the birth, she rents an apartment on the scruffy southern edge of Tel Aviv and waits there for her delivery date.

At this point, the mighty Israeli landscape enters the picture. Moses is struck by how Toledano’s old camera managed to wrap wind, waves, and sky around the heavily pregnant woman as she walks on the beach. Here begins the turnabout in her mind, a reversal that Moses had to convey with few words and many silences. Slowly the meaning of the mission she has undertaken becomes clear to her: even after the child is handed over to its adoptive parents, she will always, as its mother, be tied to it. And not only to it, but to them. She, too, will have to bear the burden of their memories.

From now on, a new, painful recognition comes into focus, devised by Trigano for the ending of the film in keeping with his personal ideology. In Jerusalem, the two future adoptive parents are preparing for the imminent birth, their anxiety mingled with excitement, retaining an obstetrician and a veteran midwife, splurging on overpriced baby gear to pamper the newborn, while in Tel Aviv, the heroine is in touch with a local agency and is offering her unborn child for immediate, anonymous adoption.

And so, when the hour arrives, with no one by her side and without a word to anyone, she disappears behind the iron door of a semi-legal clinic, a door whose color Toledano requested be changed from green to blue.

Moses feels the suspense among the Spanish audience as the birth, filmed in a studio, draws near. Trigano demanded that this time he not be barred from the set and that he even take part in the directing. But the childbirth scene was cut out in the editing room, where it seemed crude and inconsistent with the spirit of the film. Ruth had screamed and writhed more than she’d been asked to, and the blood did not look realistic. The transfer of the newborn to the social worker was filmed in a real hospital, in the maternity wing. The infant, who was a week old, was loaned to the production by the sister-in-law of the soundman, but only on condition that she play the social worker receiving the child for adoption. And though the woman had never stood before a movie camera, she played her role so naturally that Ruth broke uncontrollably into real tears. Who knows better than Moses about all the fake tears he got out of her in subsequent films. He is amazed how genuine and pained was her weeping in this one, so much so that the screen seems to tremble.

He turns around to find Ruth and sees that Doña Elvira, the experienced actress, also appreciates the dramatic quality of this crying and holds Ruth’s hand as if to congratulate and console her.

From here the film carries on to the end, but not to Trigano’s stormy ending. The pale new mother will not open her coat and undo her blouse in a gesture of generosity and despair. She will not breastfeed the aged actor from the National Theater. She will just keep walking and head to the beach.

Moses had to improvise these last moments of the film on the spot, and he made do with an atmospheric ending. The young mother is distressed not only over the child she has given up, but by the disappointment she has caused her two beloved teachers, the survivors of hell, who so believed in her, and she begins walking slowly but steadily along the beach, and when she vanishes in the distance, the audience in the dark is meant to believe that she is secure in her newly acquired freedom.

“THE HOUR IS late and the municipal workers must get back to work,” whispers de Viola to Moses amid the robust applause in the room. “Let’s try,” he suggests, “to make the ceremony short. There’s been more than enough talking at your retrospective.”

“Indeed.”

While the credits roll, employees of the mayor’s office bring a small table, cover it with a green cloth, place two chairs behind it, and set up a microphone and next to it a pitcher of water and two glasses. The names keep parading down the screen, albeit in smaller and smaller letters. People stand and stretch and start to chat, but the projectionist has yet to stop the film. And Manuel, picking up a signal from his brother to get things moving, steers his elderly mother in small steps to the table, where a city official shoves an envelope into her hand, at which point the director of the archive nudges Moses from his chair and invites him to the stage.

But on the makeshift screen, with remarkable persistence, continues the recitation of gratitude to all manner of institutions, large and small, and to private individuals, and artisans and drivers, restaurant owners and cooks, all of them engaged, often unknowingly, in the creation of this film. See, Moses says, congratulating himself, even in an early film I had many partners, overt and covert, who supported my art.

Doña Elvira speaks softly in Spanish, with Manuel translating line by line into formal Hebrew, and Moses gets the gist: The prize is not large, but it is presented with appreciation for a director who at the beginning of his career was unafraid of the absurd and metaphysical and allegorical, and we all know, going back to Luis Buñuel, how hard it is to inject authenticity and warmth into abstract ideas and wild, surrealistic dreams cloaked in a shaft of light cast upon a screen, and we thus owe a great debt to those courageous enough to take this difficult path.

Moses kisses her on both cheeks and offers a brief response:

“During my long life I have participated in any number of retrospectives of my films, in my homeland and abroad, but I know that these three days in Santiago de Compostela I shall remember till my dying day. Yes, Doña Elvira, beyond the manifest reality lurks a dark abyss, and we must rip open the screen and look straight into it, for only then will we know how best to handle what is known and apparently understood. But we must not become addicted to it, for then despair will sap our strength. Therefore a prize is also due those who loyally stick to the familiar and day-to-day, to draw from it joy and consolation.”

And Moses again warmly embraces the elderly actress, who whispers to him: “Your film touched me and made me think, but why was the ending so vague and empty of meaning?”

“The ending?” Moses smiles.

“Yes, the end. The very end.”

“The end,” Moses explains, “is always a compromise between what was and what will never be.”

NO DOUBT, thinks Moses, sticking the envelope in the inside pocket of his jacket, this was a far-reaching retrospective, and if the Spaniards drew pleasure from the vertigo they caused me, I earned my prize. He watches Doña Elvira, who has chosen to lean not on her son the monk, whose robe billows mischievously down the marble stairs, but on the arm of the Israeli actress, who makes sure the fragile Spanish lady does not trip on the hem of her long dress.

After her feet land safely on the rain-spangled pavement, the legendary actress does not let go of the helpful womanly arm but asks Ruth to come with her to an antique store in the Old Town. Don’t worry about my mother, Manuel assures Moses, who briefly wondered if he too should not escort the prize giver to the Old Town. Everywhere in Spain people know who she is and attend to her. And he invites Moses to accompany him to the library of the cathedral to browse through one collection or another of the many treasures amassed over the centuries.