Biographical drama by Guy Nattiv “Golda. Judgment Day”. Review

The biographical drama by Guy Nattiv “Golda. Judgment Day”, dedicated to several weeks in the life of the fourth Prime Minister of Israel, Golda Meir, who fell on the Yom Kippur War. Controversial as almost every political figure in Israeli history, the heroine was played by Helen Mirren, adding her to her gallery of women invested and burdened with power. Tells Yulia Shagelman.

When the picture crosses the first third – after numerous meetings and meetings in the smoke-filled office of the Prime Minister, discouraging losses and retreats of the first days of the war, and a promise to send military aircraft to help Israel with flattery, persuasion and mild blackmail, pulled out of Henry Kissinger (Liv Schreiber),— Golda gathers people who decide the fate of the country at home, serving her own baked chocolate cake with coffee. Here, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan (Rami Hueberger), Chief of Staff Dado Elazar (Lior Ashkenazi), Chief of Military Intelligence Eli Zeira (Dvir Benedek), Mossad Chief Zvi Zamir (Rotem Keinan) – all these stern, battle-hardened men look at the prime minister as a strict but beloved teacher, in front of whom you are a little shy, but you perceive her approval as the best assessment. Ambitious general Ariel Sharon (Ohad Knoller) is eager to fight, offering to break through the Egyptian defenses with much smaller forces than theirs. After conferring with the others, Golda decides to wait: the enemy, intoxicated with easy success, will certainly make a mistake himself. When everyone leaves, she consoles Sharon with the fact that he will still have a chance to shine, which will eventually lead him to the prime minister’s chair. “But remember,” she says, “any political career ends in failure.”

The film starts with evidence of her own failure: after the end of the war, formally favorable for Israel, Golda reports to the state commission about the mistakes and mistakes of those first terrible days, taking full responsibility for herself. Sitting opposite her – overweight, with swollen legs, lighting one cigarette from another – strict gray-haired men in black suits will not know (at least according to Nattiv and screenwriter Nicholas Martin) about Dayan’s nervous breakdown, after the defeat on the Golan Heights he rushed about office and called for the use of nuclear weapons, nor that Zeira knew about the impending attack, but withheld this information, not wanting to admit that he was mistaken in his predictions. These episodes are shown in flashbacks, drowning in cigarette smoke and lit by a dim brownish light that barely makes its way into cramped offices and rooms filled with old-fashioned furniture through lowered blinds and drawn curtains.

There is no fighting on the screen at all: sometimes the narrative is torn apart by short frames of a black-and-white chronicle, but all the worst here is conveyed by sound, when Golda and her generals listen to live broadcasts from the front line at headquarters – jerky negotiations, shell explosions, screams of dying soldiers. The prime minister scrupulously writes down the numbers of casualties in a notebook – then she will answer the corresponding question of the commission without hesitation, without forgetting anyone. And how can you forget when at night they again and again remind her of themselves, desperately begging to be let go home.

At the same time, Golda’s own, private battle unfolds – with lymphoma, which she keeps a secret from everyone except her devoted assistant, Lou Caddar (Camille Cotten). She secretly arrives at the hospital for radiotherapy sessions (Lou pulls another cigarette from her fingers yellowed from nicotine right before the procedure), where she is taken through the morgue, and with each visit there are more and more dead bodies in it. Either this war unequivocally reminds of itself, or Golda’s brain, exhausted by pain, insomnia and anxiety, finds a material embodiment of the numbers from the notebook.

Golda herself, performed by Mirren, unrecognizable under layers of make-up, also turns into a symbol and monument to both an outstanding woman and the entire stubborn nation, which continues to adamantly hold on to a piece of desert land in the course of the film. Sometimes, however, the authors of the film let her breathe a little and become human again, as, for example, in the scene where she literally tortures Kissinger with borscht: this look of a Jewish grandmother, making sure that her granddaughters eat everything to the end, will be recognized by anyone who has ever faced him. A person, alone in death, like any other, she remains even when she dies in a hospital room to the cheerful voice from the TV, announcing the steps taken thanks to her on the path to peace – a path that, forty-five years later, has not yet led anywhere.