As the movie opens, the camera takes us through an installation outside the Tel Aviv Museum of Art decrying the Hamas abductions of October 2023 and it lingers on a group of women there performing a yoga session. Yoga in Tel Aviv to support hostages in Gaza. I could only wonder whether writer/director Amos Gitai was pointing out the fatuous absurdity of self-centered activism or whether he was on board. But a Jerusalem Post article by Hannah Brown (who didn't like the movie much) explains that this was a salute to Carmel Gat, who had guided fellow hostages in therapeutic yoga before she was murdered. It may also have to do with the popular idea, which Gitai treats sympathetically, that women are innocent of warlike impulses.
I hadn't known about the Carmel Gat connection. Reviewer Hannah Brown, for her part, missed a connection in the person of a woman in orange who haunts part of the movie. That's Virginia Woolf, who is one of the writers quoted in the script. As elsewhere in his work, Gitai likes to use long quotations as monologues for his actors. Open in his artifice, he also shows the actors as themselves besides showing them as Virginia Woolf and, more prominently, Freud and Einstein.
It seems that Freud and Einstein corresponded on the topic of war, why it exists, and how to prevent it. Of course, if they had come to any useful conclusion we'd know about it, and so where those great questions are concerned the movie falls a little flat despite all else. And all else is quite fine overall. Not only the photography and the earnest acting, but the soundscape as well. In the nouvelle vague tradition, Gitai seems more interested in excellence scene by scene than in a plot that sweeps the audience along. He's much better appreciated in Europe than in his native Israel, and I suppose this movie will not change that. The remarks on war as part of human nature seem consistent with a kind of moral equivalence between enemies, and Israel resents hints of such equivalence. In addition, the push toward war is blamed partly on religion and in Israel, where it is those most strict about religious observance who refuse to join the army, that accusation doesn't strike a perfectly clear echo.
For whatever reason, when I attended a 7 pm showing at the most prominent cinema complex of the Tel Aviv area, the audience consisted only of me. The movie deserved to fill a few more seats, but as Hannah Brown says in her review, waspishly quoting Valéry, "Everything changes but the avant-garde." Gitai has settled into a niche where each of his movies spins out oracular scene after scene, focusing on character after character, cumulatively building a world that reflects our own from a particular point of view; and aside from what some of us would call political naïveté, there's nothing wrong with that.
