A film about Israel that is as divided as its subject
“Ahed’s Knee” Unrated. Contains strong language, violence and images of war. Running time: 109 minutes.
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At once a fevered study of the creative process and of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, “Ahed’s Knee” is as divided - and perhaps as irreconcilable - as the region in which it is set. Even its title contains two wildly different references.
The first is to Ahed Tamimi, a Palestinian teenager who in 2017 was arrested for slapping an Israeli soldier. (At the time, a prominent Israeli politician remarked that she deserved to be shot, at least in the knee.) The second is to French filmmaker Éric Rohmer’s “Claire’s Knee,” a 1970 drama about a middle-aged man who becomes fixated on a teenage girl. Yet the eponymous joint is merely a jumping-off point for Israeli director Nadav Lapid (“Synonyms”), whose fragmented, unpredictable drama is as maddening as it is moving.
The film begins with a young actress on a motorcycle speeding to a film audition where she flashes her knee; she’s there for a filmmaker known as Y (Avshalom Pollak), who’s working on a new project called “The Knee of Ahed Tamimi.” But after a tryout in which the actress yells along to “Welcome to the Jungle” by Guns N’ Roses, the character never appears again. The sequence quickly gives you a sense of Lapid’s audacious methods, which happen to include avoidance.
The action shifts abruptly to the arid Arabah valley, where Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a representative of the Israeli Ministry of Culture, has invited Y to screen his latest film. But there’s a catch: The ministry requires Y to sign a form stating that his work covers one of several prescribed
subjects. Unfortunately, these approved subjects do not leave room for the artist’s true theme, which is the cruelty of the Israeli government: as Y laments, the fact that “anyone who dissents is crushed.”
In short, this sounds like we’re in store for a straightforward polemic against government oppression. But Lapid has an annoying habit: He can’t help but introduce whiplash-inducing diversions
and camera movements, again and again.
Such devices worked well in “Synonyms,” whose protagonist was a kind of overgrown, inattentive, feral child. In “Ahed’s Knee,” Lapid amps up the interruptions, and if his restless aesthetic seems vibrant at first, it soon gets tedious. Even in a quiet scene in which Y and Yahalom are having a leisurely indoor conversation, the camera rapidly cuts from her face to the desert landscape outside and back not once but several times.
“Ahed’s Knee” is mostly about Y’s inability to confront his own traumatic experience as an Israeli soldier, and these visual ruptures may be a metaphor for a part of the world that has been fought over for centuries. But on the way to a powerful final act, Lapid gets lost in his seemingly arbitrary aesthetic. In one throwaway sequence, a peripheral character dances along to the song “Lovely Day,” by Bill Withers. It’s all entertaining enough, in a shaggy way. But if the director can’t stay focused on his own subject, how are we expected to do so?
Lapid clearly has a distinct and potent vision. For much of the film, Y and Yahalom wander together through a desert landscape that might as well be the surface of the moon. These scenes have an apocalyptic resonance: The world has already ended, and strife is eternal.
Late in the story, during a pivotal scene, Lapid’s concerns pour forth in a painfully candid monologue in which the camera is so close to the protagonist’s face that you can’t see his mouth. Here the quirky composition finally makes sense; Y can’t face himself - let alone the world, or a state as brutal as his own. He finally gets Yahalom to admit that she works for a “minister of the arts who hates art, in a government that hates all human beauty.” It’s a big payoff, but it comes almost too late, after meandering for so long.
The desert setting is the film’s central metaphor, for a homeland that looks like nowhere, with infertility at its core. Even if Lapid had reined in his worst impulses and concentrated on the theme at hand, “Ahed’s Knee” might have been too difficult to watch. On the other hand, his distractions don’t do his art - or his audience - any favors either.