Drilling into the Bristol dilemma
What happened when an Israeli satirist followed his wife’s job to Paris? James Mottram finds out
YOU KNOW your life has reached a new low in terms of lack of excitement when you receive a text from the dentist prompting you to book an appointment, and you think: Ooh, an outing! And you know you’ve been slouching around in track-pants for way too long when you put on jeans instead and feel as if you’ve dressed up. For months, I’ve been wearing lovely, lovely stretchy jogging bottoms (multiple pairs — worn and washed in rotation, if you’re worrying that lockdown has made me throw all niceties out of the window).
But now that I am going out on a dental adventure, I feel I should don proper clothing. The dentist is in North Finchley, four miles away in an entirely different postcode — really, I think it justifies earrings and mascara as well as trousers that aren’t basically PJs.
Never before have I noticed how vice-like a proper waistband feels. I’m sure it has nothing to do with my lockdown baking obsession (well, the results have to be eaten — I’m not putting my homemade spelt sourdough out for the parakeets).
As a child, I was very scared of the dentist — even though he was perfectly nice. I particularly found the sound of the drill when I had to have a filling traumatic — it felt as though it were coming from inside me, all my dark fears made manifest into a prolonged, inescapable whine. Once, on being told I would need a filling, I jumped up out of the chair and ran behind the desk in the corner of the room and refused to come out until my mother and the dentist agreed it could wait.
Now, a few decades and a few dentists later, I am a much more compliant patient. I do not run around the room or attempt to hide behind the furniture. It helps that my dentist is lovely — fantastically calm and reassuring. Also, that he has no desk in the room behind which I might retreat.
Despite its lack of handy hidey-holes, his surgery is very nice, and the one place where I would literally be happy to eat off the floor it’s so clean. Now in the era of Covid, even more so, as every door handle has a little protective sleeve that is changed for each patient and they ‘fog’ the room between appointments (it’s an anti-viral vapour — it doesn’t mean that the dentist is poking around my gums unable to see).
As we are in a single household, my son Leo can have his appointment immediately before mine (though my dentist still fogs the room — compliance is his middle name).
Leo is in the lower sixth at school ‘studying’ for his A-levels, ie watching the entirety of Netflix from the sofa, and starting to think about university.
When it’s my turn, I am given an anti-viral liquid to sloosh and hold in my mouth for a whole minute (it has interesting top-notes of embalming fluid and takes massive restraint not to expel it in a jet over the floor).
While I am therefore unable to speak, the dentist, who belongs to the same shul as we do, says he hopes he hasn’t over-stepped the mark (he hasn’t) by telling Leo about an antisemitism issue at the University of Bristol.
He refers to a piece by Daniel Finkelstein in The Times about David Miller, a professor of political sociology at Bristol. This professor claims that ordinary British Jewish students are somehow being directed by the state of Israel and that a rather sweet project to have Muslims and Jews make chicken soup together was actually part of a sinister plot to normalise Zionism among Muslims.
I was aware that there was currently an issue at Bristol, but had decided not to tell Leo for a number of reasons: these things change all the time and I don’t want to make him feel paranoid by telling him to rule out this, this and this place as they’ve had problems with antisemitism; one of my nieces went to Bristol a few years ago and had no problems — and also I believe Leo should apply to university if he finds a place he likes the feel of and it offers a course that appeals to him, not on the basis of “Is it good for the Jews?”
The dentist then tells me that Leo said well maybe he would go to Bristol and try to change things there. This from a boy who often has to be levered off the sofa with a crowbar.
Afterwards, I spoke to Leo to check what he’d said. He explained it wasn’t that he was planning to storm the barricades, just that he thought it was important not to slink below the radar if there’s a problem.
He understood that there is a clear difference between, say, dealing with the Spanish Inquisition when your wisest options might be run, hide, or comply, and a problem within an institution such as a university, where you should complain and stand up and be counted.
“Racism, antisemitism and sexual harassment are pretty much everywhere, Mum,” Leo tells me. “You probably can’t avoid them.”
It seems that, despite — or perhaps because of the restrictions of lockdown — he is growing up.
WHEN FILMMAKER Eli Ben-David heard from his wife that she’d been offered a job as cultural attaché at the Israeli embassy in Paris, he was immediately concerned. “The almost instant fear I got was: ‘OK, what will it do to our marriage? How are we going to make it?’” Partly, his concerns were selfish. As the co-creator of popular satirical comedy shows like Anachnu BaMapa, Ben-David was also enjoying native success that a huge move abroad might disrupt. “I was in the peak of my career back home in Israel.”
Despite being unable to speak French, he took the plunge — moving with his wife and family to start a new life in Paris and becoming in expat terms a ‘trailing spouse’. Now, over five years on, he’s turned their experiences into his new show, The Attaché, a beguiling comedy-drama that examines the strains on a married couple who move to France from Israel. “It was a diary, like a private diary,” he says. “I just wanted to put on paper, as a therapy, my own little story about relocation and it has become what it’s become.”
In The Attaché, Ben-David plays Avshalom, an Israeli Jewish man of Moroccan descent. A successful musician, he moves to Paris for his spouse Annabelle’s new job — again, at the Israeli embassy in Paris. “I took a lot from my wife’s experiences. Of course, I exaggerated to make it more dramatic, but my wife… she took on responsibility for me, for the kids, for the house, for her new job. So it was an extremely tough situation for her. So there is a lot of similarity to what’s happening to Annabelle.”
Did his wife mind being fodder for his latest TV show? “She’s used to it with me!” he laughs. After satirising the great and the good in Israel “now it was my turn to do it, to point the knife and the guns through me. I told her, ‘Hey, if I’m jumping into this, I’m going to bring everybody — us, you, me, your parents, my parents, whatever.’ Of course, it’s a series, a fiction. But still, I’m gonna base it on that.”
The ten-episode limited series, which debuts on Starzplay on Sunday, boasts plenty of Ben-David’s comic leanings — he has a Buster Keaton-like energy at times. But there’s drama stirred into the melting pot too. The first episode begins with Avshalom and Annabelle newly arrived in the City of Light, only to be caught up in the horrifying Parisian terror attacks that shook the city back in November 2015, when Islamic extremists killed 130 people with a series of orchestrated bombings.
Ben-David had just moved to Paris one month earlier when the terrorists struck. “It was pretty intense,” he remarks, “and it gave me the inspiration to start dealing with these issues — Israeli-Arabic immigrants coming to Europe.” The writer-director, who was raised in Tel Aviv by parents who were born in Morocco, began to find Arab speakers in Paris talking to him on the streets after the attacks. “I reconnected to my Arab roots,” he admits. “For me, this connection was immediate. I get along with Arab people here [in Paris] more than I ever did back home in Israel.”
When it came to casting the role of Annabelle, Ben-David ended up selected French actress Héloïse Godet, who previously worked with the grandmaster of Gallic cinema, Jean-Luc Godard on his 2014 narrative essay, Goodbye to Language. “We were looking for an Israeli actress who could speak French,” he says. “We were auditioning these actresses in Israel and I immediately felt that their French was not correct. So I said to my casting director, ‘You know what? Maybe we will find some Jewish actresses that might speak [French].’”
Unable to speak Hebrew, Godet asked an Israeli makeup artist-friend to teach her how to say a couple of lines phonetically in the language, in order that she could send a taped greeting to Ben-David. It was good enough to fool him into calling her. “He talked to me in Hebrew,” she recalls. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know Hebrew, I’m just faking it!’” Against his better judgement, Ben-David gave her a shot at auditioning for Annabelle, sending her a full episode to learn. “She came back with phonetic Hebrew, not perfect, but I immediately realised that this woman… she’s totally obsessive!”
Godet took up with a Hebrew coach and spent the next three months immersing herself in the language. “I learned it like crazy,” she says. Ben-David sent her songs from Israeli musicians, which helped, and she also spent time visiting synagogues in Paris. “I chose one near me and said ‘Hey, can I come?’ And they said, ‘Yeah, just come whenever you want.’” Such was the intensity of her crashcourse, she estimates if she spent a few more months, she could become fluent. “I know how to read and write. It’s just a matter of a few more words to learn.”
Wisely, Ben-David also brought her into the scripting stage, helping craft Annabelle’s dialogue “to understand the subtext of what she’s saying”. It turned out to be a useful collaboration, with Godet able to advise on French social and cultural subtleties. “Héloïse was my gate to Paris and to the French language,” says Ben-David, who admits he still struggles with speaking in French (and a lot of the humour in The Attaché comes from Avshalom’s own linguistic ineptness).
Despite all these efforts, there was still concern from the other creatives on the show when Godet stepped on set. “I remember the first shooting day — my Israeli cinematographer came to me after one scene and told me, ‘What have you done? She will not make it!’ Because it was the first scene. It was an exterior scene, it was freezing, it was in Ukraine [in Kiev, where much of the show was shot, doubling for Paris], and she had some difficulties. I told them, ‘You will see! She is more Jewish than us!’”
Listening to Ben-David, as he speaks from his Paris apartment over Zoom, the making of The Attaché was far from easy. After he wrote it, he felt the catharsis was enough.
“I said, ‘You know guys, maybe we cancel this? I wrote it all. For me, it’s enough. I don’t have this need to shoot it, especially with me in the front of it.’” Persuaded otherwise, he not only took the lead but also directed all the episodes. “I’m happy in the end that I did that. It was very joyful. But it was hell! We were shooting in winter, in summer, in spring. I didn’t see my family for a long time!”
Though still based in France, 44-year-old Ben-David remains keen to continue working in Israel, which is such a hotbed of creativity right now. He’s tightly connected to others in the industry, including Daphna Levin, who created TV’s Euphoria that was recently remade by HBO, and Sigal Avin, whose show Losing Alice is currently doing so well on Apple TV+.
“I think we are in this romantic period. The world discovered how we write [in Israel],” he says. “If you knock on a door in Israel and you say, ‘Tell me a story’… then you have a series, you have a feature.” He smiles. “We are very different in Israel.”
If you knock on a door in Israel and you say ‘tell me a story’ then you have a series, you have a feature’
The Attaché is on Starzplay from March 14