Howling engine noise, passing house fronts, pounding rain. A woman on a motorcycle, visor down, speeding down a Tel Aviv expressway on a confrontational course. At the end she enters a building, takes a seat, opens her outfit and rips her tights, revealing her kneecap. To do this, an actor read out a tweet in a staccato staccato, as if firing off a verbal machine gun salvo: The knee deserves a bullet to condemn the wearer to immobility for the rest of her life.
The woman, it turns out, is attending a film audition, starring in a scene that deals with political events from 2017 and 2018. At the time, 16-year-old Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi circulated a video of her on the fringes of riots in the West Bank punches an Israeli soldier in the face, for which she was arrested and convicted. The right-wing religious Israeli politician Bezalel Smotrich then wrote on Twitter that she deserved a bullet – “at least in the kneecap”.
This is the starting point for the film project of director X. (Avshalom Pollak). There is singing at the casting, a barrage of handshakes raining down on the kneecap, and finally X. takes a hammer “to smash the knee”. The activist’s rebellious energy has X.’ permeated with art. But also the aggressiveness of politicians like Smotrich.
The director X. is a kind of alter ego of the Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who called his new film “Ahed’s Knee”. It’s no longer about the knee, the casting and the planned film-within-a-film, but rather we immerse ourselves in the everyday life of the filmmaker, who – just like Lapid himself – is extremely critical of his country. In his last film “Synonymes”, for which he won the Golden Bear at the Berlinale in 2019, Lapid followed a young Israeli who emigrated to Paris to lose his hated mother tongue. Now Lapid returns to his homeland to sue her on his own land. He won the jury prize in Cannes last year for “Aheds Knie”.
Director X. soon travels to a small village in the Arava desert to present one of his earlier films. Here he meets Yahalom (Nur Fibak), who works at the Ministry of Culture. She hands him a form to tick for the ministry what he will speak about. There are only harmless topics to choose from. But what, X. asks, if he wants to talk about the “loss of the soul of this country and its brutalization”? Can he tick that too?
The State of Israel, says Nadav Lapid’s alter ego, despises its artists
For X., the list is an expression of censorship and tutelage: Artists with “differing opinions” are made more difficult or denied funding. What is meant here is probably the cultural policy of Miri Regev, Minister for Culture and Sport, who will be active until 2020, against which there have been violent protests in Israel. Which is why X. wants to tape the woman from the Ministry and get her to confess that the Ministry of Art despises art and has declared war on all artists. But in the end it is he who screams all his hatred for his country out into the desert.
In its namelessness, X. stands for Lapid and other left-wing Israeli artists. He’s less a character than a condensation of cinematic energy and political anger that makes the film maximally uncomfortable. Not only in relation to its content, but above all in relation to its form. In the foreground you can see a back, the background is blurred. The bit of sharpness that is left is “squeezed out”, as if Lapid wanted to show that you can hardly shoot a political film in Israel without having to wring every shot from the state.
There is also a tenacious, tormenting erotic tension between the artist and the ministry woman, a constant approach in which their lips keep coming closer without ever touching. That is only logical: the kiss would be the ultimate fusion between artist and state, which must not happen. In addition, there must be enough space between the lips to speak, shout, accuse. If they kissed, it would be X.’ Mouth sewn up, the protest dead. And yet artist and state remain unbearably close, close enough to kiss.
This tension runs through the whole film. The nervously panning, almost springy camera illustrates X.’ Anger and his energy, but it also connects the filmmaker to the desert that he walks through, in which he calls and sometimes dances. It locates the filmmaker geographically in the very country against which he is fighting and on which X. lands on his stomach, his lips touching the stones. And then there’s X.’ military past, which he tells Yahalom about in flashbacks, and in which his role remains so ambivalent and open that the boundaries between perpetrator and victim become completely blurred.
X. also wants to escape from the city of Jerusalem, but has to realize: “Nothing can ever separate you and me!” Intrinsic connectedness is part of his protest. Therein lies the political intelligence of Lapid’s films: in the evidence of the impossibility of getting rid of what has been accused and hated when it is already within oneself. Whether it is a mother tongue, as in “Synonymes”, or a territory, as here. Without this precise, formally merciless examination of this connection, Lapid’s cinema would be just any political pamphlet, a “position”, a mere assertion. Lapid turns his film into a weapon that self-destructs. And at the very end, when everything was already filmed, he even accepted financial support from the Israeli Ministry of Culture.
Ahed’s Knee, Israel, Germany, France 2021 – Director and script: Nadav Lapid. Camera: Shai Goldman. Cut: Nile Feller. With Avshalom Pollak, Nur Fibak, Yoram Honig. Grand film, 109 minutes. Film start: 03/17/2022.