Forgiveness

Maybe the stage would have been a better home for this work than the screen. Or else the visual side of the movie should have been more strongly stylized, so that the heavy-handed material would look less ridiculous in contrast. The movie opens with a bit of dialog taken directly from Hamlet and spoken in an Israeli mental institution where evidently everyone speaks in English. Israelis speaking English to one another would be understandable if it were a consistent convention in the movie, but outside the mental institution they don't seem to. And the English is a struggle for the actors-- although some of the preachy, symbolic proclamations they give forth with would be a struggle for any actor. The movie seems to be telling us that the Israeli nation will be insane until it comes face to face with its guilt and recognizes that its conflict with the Arabs, and indeed its very presence, is nothing but a compulsion born of Holocaust trauma. The movie's Hebrew title MECHILOT can be seen as corresponding to its English title FORGIVENESS, for it implies that the Arabs (shown here as guiltless and quite modern as well) will forgive a repentant, self-abnegating Jew; but the Hebrew title more obviously means BURROWS-- another reference to Hamlet, as it is explained that the Jews arrived in Israel underground and dead like the "old mole" who was the ghost of Hamlet's father.