A meditation on redemption

BASYA LAYE

A creeping sense of foreboding washes over the opening frames of Dissolution (Hitparkut), a film by Los Angeles-based independent filmmaker Nina Menkes, which is showing as part of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

Using Fyodr Dostoevsky’s 1866 novel Crime and Punishment as a starting point, Dissolution is a quiet and stark film, suffused with loneliness and alienation that permeates the story of a disillusioned and devolving Yafo man, R (played by Israeli actor Didi Fire), who commits a terrible crime. Stifled by his environment and exhausted by his own fatalism, R seeks some modicum of redemption and connection, traveling on an existential journey to the darkest recesses of his psyche.

Born in the United States to Israeli Holocaust-survivor parents, Menkes has made seven films, including The Bloody Child and Phantom Love. Her latest – and her first in Hebrew – was filmed entirely in Israel, with an Israeli cast and crew, and marks somewhat of a departure in her well-established oeuvre. It won a best drama award at the Jerusalem Film Festival earlier this year.

In an interview with the Independent, Menkes said that she was inspired to make the film on a recent teaching stint at Tel Aviv University, on a Fulbright that allowed her to live in Israel for a year.

“I wanted to live in Yafo,” she said, “which is the mixed area of Tel Aviv – ‘mixed’ meaning Arabs and Jews living together – although it’s mainly Arab – just because I feel more comfortable like that ... plus I found a nice apartment just minutes away from a beautiful beach.”

Menkes said, “Two months after arriving, while visiting a friend and feeling bored, I perused her bookshelf and, seeing Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, asked if I could borrow it. I had no intention to make a feature film in Yafo, actually. I thought I would maybe create a short documentary about local cats (there are many!), something very low key, just me and a small video camera. But, in the process of reading Crime and Punishment, I started thinking that that story, transposed into modern Yafo, would be a very exciting film. I had a meeting with Marek Rozenbaum, one of Israel’s top producers, and told him my basic idea. He liked it and said he would support me and so, with this encouragement, I proceeded.”

To get into the right headspace, Menkes spent time at Latroun, a Trappist monastery between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.

“I went to Latroun with my computer, turned off my cellphone ... and started feeling the atmosphere. I also attended their prayer services, which are very beautiful. It was in this context that the whole film, slowly, appeared to me, in images. It just appeared. And I wrote down what I saw.”

Even though she usually creates for a female protagonist – whom Menkes refers to as the “Wounded Female” – she chose to tell this particular story using a male main character. “I’ve made many films with a lead woman character ... she is alienated, very alone, frozen on some level, angry and deeply damaged. She is also very smart, a rebel, beautiful, in some way extremely strong and surely fierce. She wants to believe in some goodness in this world, perhaps in what we might call God, but cannot exactly find a way. It’s clear that the male character in Dissolution is ... the masculine mirror of this woman.... At the same time, being a man, he is singularly up against certain different kinds of tensions and struggles.

“I had reached a point in my life and work, where my lead female character (somehow the same person transforming slowly over the years, film by film) had arrived at a certain level of acceptance and softening towards herself, as expressed in my 2007 film Phantom Love. As my films are deeply personal, I knew, or rather something inside me apparently knew, that I needed to turn my attention towards the figure of my own inner ‘Wounded Masculine.’ This was what was calling me, and it called me very strongly.”

There is a grave sense of ennui in Dissolution and, though the protagonist may feel “condemned,” Menkes said, “he also feels superior, special, chosen for this special suffering, or some unique task. He may, indeed, be special, but his arrogance is actually a defence against his vulnerability, his fears and his deepest needs.”

There is a lot of “quiet” violence in Dissolution, suiting the black and white digital film Menkes works with and the bleak but simmering environment of the seaport town. She is not so deliberate, however, in her creative process. “My films are not ‘thought out,’ rather, they appear to me on a purely intuitive level. Watching the film, it seems to me that it is permeated by violence – but the violence is almost always portrayed after the fact.... There is more an emphasis on the end result of violence: wounding and death, and this is quiet, yes, also, cinematically, it is quiet. In this sense, the film differs from most films that are concerned with the condition of violence, which tend to focus on the violent action.”

Menkes set the film in Yafo, a neighborhood with Jews and Muslims and Christian Arabs, she explained, “to bring out the political aspects of the movie – the crisis between the Jews and Arabs in this area of the world. The film is primarily the story of one man’s approach to the possibility of redemption, of love, but it is, at the same time, a larger story about the peoples in this area.”

However, she added, “I don’t think living in Yafo increases his sense of alienation, rather, it serves to give voice to it. And him pushing people away is part of his inability to connect. Ultimately, all alienation is non-connection and that other feeling, a sense of love and faith, is actually a feeling of connection. So this is the essence of his struggle. He wants to connect, on many levels, but there are obstacles, both inner and outer.”

Menkes met and hired Fire to play R after being introduced to him by a mutual friend, New York filmmaker Marc Lafia. “I said I’ll read the script and see,” explained Fire in an e-mail interview. “I found the script problematic in many ways, and asked Nina if she was open to changes, for a process of composing together. She said yes – I was in.”

Though Fire’s performance has been heralded as powerful, there has been some focus on his “non-professional actor” status. Fire is not convinced, however, that the label is accurate. “It’s fashionable to talk of ‘non-professional actors.’ It means that the project is more ‘authentic.’ In fact, it’s far from being true.... I [have] worked with video artists, dancers, etc., and did many performance art projects myself, with a lot of stage experience. My professional education is really [in] mathematics. I compose using algorithms to make choices for me. I use a very high level [of] dealing with numbers [as a music composer], with the illusion that, in this way, it becomes ‘truth’ rather than ‘esthetics.’”

Fire rejects the notion that his character is an antihero. “He acts in the world,” he explained. “He kills without any reason or gaining anything from it. He is obviously a Nietzschean character. Nietzsche is heroism, with all the sickness of it.” But, clarified Fire, “he is brave enough to surrender to God. All of this is what I understand as ‘hero.’ What else is hero? Saving your lover from the bad guys?”

From his help with writing and editing to his fierce performance, Fire brings a great deal to the film, and Menkes doesn’t mince words when it comes to her star.

“He brought – truly – his whole life and soul to the film, and I am very grateful for his amazing work, as an actor and also his contribution to the writing and editing,” she said. “Creating the film was a true action of love on his part, and I can say with all sincerity: Didi gave me the movie.”

VIFF runs from Sept. 30-Oct. 15. For the entire festival schedule and ticket information, visit viff.org.

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