Theater of Divine Actions – Weekend
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“Golda. Judgment Day is a film that opened the last Berlin Film Festival, inventively and mournfully tells about 19 days in the life of Golda Meir, the fourth Prime Minister of Israel, in which the state almost lost the war with Egypt and Syria.
“Golda” by Gay Nattiv (already the third film with this title, dedicated to Golda Meir, the addition of “Judgment Day” appeared in the Russian version) focuses on the tragic events of October 1973 – the terrible Doomsday War. The military conflict with Egypt and Syria eventually led to the recognition of the state of Israel by Egypt (a peace agreement was signed by the next Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1979), but in the short term launched a serious economic and political crisis, which led to the resignation of the government.
The risky decisions of the first days of the war – the refusal to mobilize in a timely manner after receiving spy reports of an impending attack, the refusal of a preventive missile attack by the Egyptian troops concentrated at the Suez Canal, suicidal tank counterattacks – led to colossal casualties and later became the subject of proceedings by the state “Agranat Commission”. In the film, Golda is shown as the only defendant. Between chemistry courses (the last 10 years of her life, Meir struggled with lymphoma), she comes to report on her decisions to a dozen harsh men – and we immediately find ourselves in the roaring sirens of 1973.
However, what is a flashback and what is a flashforward is difficult to understand. Just as it is sometimes difficult to distinguish directorial metaphors from real events. A flock of birds suddenly flies into the ventilation pipe of the government office and covers its corridors with a dead colored carpet – is it true or a dream? Merging into a death cry, the radio communications of Israeli tankers who stumbled upon Egyptian infantry with an unprecedented number of RPGs – a night or day nightmare? Golda walks through the morgue—dozens of numbered feet protrude from the plank shelves—and enters the radiologist’s office, where she begins her routine examination: what was that? Nails peeled to meat, fingers yellow from tobacco, homemade chocolate cake, from which young Ari Sharon sneaks a quarter off – in a few days his division will cross the Suez Canal and begin to encircle the 3rd Egyptian army, locked in the Sinai (this operation will decide the outcome of the war ): Fact or Fiction? Is the outcome of the war a victory or a catastrophe?
“Golda” is the most non-standard and experimental cinema possible within the framework of the historical narrative about a national catastrophe; 2656 dead in the Yom Kippur War – there were no such losses even in 1948, during the war for independence). The best thing that could be done for their memory is to explain the causes of the catastrophic defeat in the first days of the war. The script of the film is indeed largely based on the documents of the state commission, declassified in 2013. The double game of the Americans, who did not want the collapse of relations with OPEC, gouging in the Israeli intelligence services, self-confidence after previous military victories, on the one hand, and the objective impossibility of choosing the lesser of evils, on the other. In a sense, “Golda” even penetrates the territory of “Chernobyl” – but very timidly: orthopedic shoes of the memorial film genre still do not allow you to go too far into the secret archives in two hours.
For all the monumentality of the figure of the on-screen Golda (Helen Mirren, dressed in rubber armor of heavy plastic make-up and shrouded in clouds of tobacco smoke), Nattiva’s film least of all resembles a standard biopic of a political leader. By this, he predictably irritated the American press – but Mirren, of course, is not playing a Hollywood success story here, but a completely different, Shakespearean drama. Its name is the burden of power; and Nattiv and Mirren play it in tragic tones – Golda’s eyes gradually become filled with blood (and nothing, it’s just blood vessels that burst from insomnia), so she turns into a Valkyrie, threatening to turn the encircled 3rd Army into an “army of widows and orphans”— and now she can’t get out of bed, crushed not only by lymphoma and pain in swollen legs, but also by the severity of fatal miscalculations. Her consciousness floats, the officers around her go crazy, the country in their delirium turns into a second Masada, and their eyes are already turning to the atomic bomb.
The main theater of operations is the ashen mask on Mirren’s face: there is not a single battle scene in the film about one of the most brutal and dramatic wars of the second half of the 20th century. The maximum is laconic shots of archival aerial photography, in which toy cotton clouds of explosions grow above the toy cubes of tanks. The massacre in the Sinai and the Golan is just an abstraction, like two lighters lying on a map and depicting two armies. Reality – voices on the air, the roar of “Phantoms” in the sky, the grimace of the widow’s face in the typography.
The main, recurring motif of “Golda” is the loneliness of Meir, who is constantly cut off from other characters either in close-up, or by the composition of the frame, or simply by the plot. Golda lies on a platform under an X-ray, smokes on the empty roof of a brutalist office, sleeps in a huge empty apartment with low ceilings – alone with her pains (here a vial of codeine flashes in a drawer), mistakes, premonitions, terrible dreams. The sky over Jerusalem is filled with omens: cigarette smoke turns into a mushroom explosion, the darkness of the night is illuminated by many electric discharges – well, or the same strange scene with a flock of birds. Yes, the mournful record of those killed and captured in Golda’s small notebook is clearly not kept by the prime minister, although by her hand. All scenarios of the Arab-Israeli wars are generally perceived by a significant part of the Israelis as part of a higher plan, full of not only miracles, but also trials. And so that we have no doubt that the helm of the IDF’s changeable military fortunes is held in the highest instance, Leonard Cohen’s “Who By Fire” turns on at the end credits. This sad song is a modern paraphrase of the Untane tokef prayer, which is also read on Yom Kippur, the Day of Judgment, when “it is affirmed who will live and who will die, who will die in due time, and who will not have time, who will die from water.” who – from the fire, to whom – from the sword. Approved, of course, not in the General Staff.
In theaters from 7 September
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