Drama, Franco-Israeli, in color Running time: 140 minutes Made in: 2004 French release: 30/03/2005 With: Roschdy Zem, Yaël Abécassis, Moshe Agazai
I more or less knew the subject of this film before going to see it, and I was preparing to write a review that would take account of all its historical and anecdotal aspects, of the new perspectives it would allow one to cast on the Israeli world, and of many other things besides. In short, I told myself that I was going to have to write a political piece about a creative work, which is the thing I hate above all else. And then…
And then I saw this film. The theater where it was being shown was tiny, and given the early hour of the screening, there were, all in all, only four of us in the audience.
A few black-and-white images, subtitled with an explanatory text, begin the show, situating it in time, the years 1984 and 1985. Then the film proper opens on the gaze of a woman, of a mother. Not a single word is spoken as a child dies in this mother’s arms. An hour and forty minutes later, the film ends on the harrowing cry of another mother. The whole story holds between that gaze and that cry, a single cry that rises toward the sky and spreads, and spreads, until it gives the impression of covering the entire earth.
In 1984, tens of thousands of Africans from twenty-six famine-stricken countries find themselves in camps in Sudan. Among them there are Muslims, of course, but also Christians and Jews. At the initiative of Israel and the United States, a vast operation is undertaken to carry thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. It is Operation Moses, which will save those who would come to be called the Falashas.
But already, on the road that leads them toward these Sudanese camps, men, women, and above all children are dying. A Jewish mother watches her nine-year-old son fade away in her arms. To save her own son from famine and death, a Christian mother, witness to this drama, is going to make a terrible decision: she is going to urge her child to declare himself a Jew, to “replace,” so to speak, the young Jewish boy who has just died. There is just an exchange of gazes between the two mothers; not a word is spoken. The child arrives in the Holy Land under the first name of Schlomo. Declared an orphan, after the death of his “second” mother, he is adopted by a French Sephardic family living in Tel Aviv…
That is the whole story of this film. Only, beyond this story, all of Israeli society will parade before our eyes. The left, of course, the right as well, the peaceable mass of people who sing and dance, the uncompromising rabbis, the narrow-minded racists, the marvelous young people. No indulgence. Usually, when it comes to Israel, the schemas are always aggressively political. Radu Mihăileanu has the talent to depict the life of this country. The human dimension of the film is overwhelming, just as much as the music that accompanies it. What can one say of what one might call the bravura passages? The scene, in front of the school, where Schlomo’s adoptive mother, to demonstrate to the parents present that her son has no disease, kisses him, licks his face and arms; Schlomo’s speech during a contest on the original color of Adam, the first man; the Bar Mitzvah and the son’s dance with the mother, etc., etc. And what, finally, can one say of that last scene where Schlomo, having become a doctor, works with “Médecins du Monde” and finds himself once again in that Sudanese camp he had left fifteen years earlier? What can one say of the way he takes off his shoes to go and join his true mother, whom he has just recognized, and of that cry uttered by the old woman to announce to the whole world that her son has come back? That he has obeyed her injunction: go, live, and become [va, vis et deviens], and that he has indeed become this man who heals and who gives.
Go see this film. And become, you too.
A gaze, in a silence marbled only by a music that tells a story. There it is. To say that this film is overwhelming is not enough.