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United States. In revolt against his fathers sterile silence, the son enlists
in the Israeli army in order to finally confront real enemies instead of
historical phantoms. He will kill the child of a woman he loves. He will
go insane, become mute, virtually criminal or suicidal, when the possible
repetition of the murder he committed looms over the child of another
woman he loves. The women in this film always come from elsewhere,
from the other apparent world, from the Arab world. The film exposes
this frightening logic of repetition of that which has not been spoken.
But the film also rejects this by engaging in the process of purification
by the return to the origin. The narration accepts ordinary materials in
their ordinary order: revolt, violence, and war; love, crime, and madness;
suicide attempts and ultimate salvation. We have here all the elements for
a melodrama. And, in fact, we have it, this melodrama. Nevertheless, that
second dimension, this melodrama, carries with it the first dimension,
since each of its terms is also a stage for the inscription of the subject
(the young hero) within the historic problem in which he is both situated
and transformed. It is here that Udi Aloni takes up the old practice of the
coming-of-age novel. And, as always in this kind of novel, individual decisions are also symbols for historical and political choices. Thus the two
possible endings that the film virtuosically sets forth. Either the young
man, symbolizing Israel, accepts this memory of having been a murderer,
and peace and reconciliation become possible, or the young man encloses
himself in silence, oblivion, and repetition, thus suiciding. That is to say,
continuing in the mode of its contemporary political orientation is the
real death threat against Israela historic suicide.
The third dimension, the psychoanalytic, draws its connection to the
two earlier dimensions by virtue of metaphor. Just as the historic underground of the Israelis, and thus of the Jews, spiritual malady is the hidden Palestine, the sons insanity finds its secret origin in what is obscured
and hidden in the father. One of the films major themes is that the contemporary problem resides, without a doubt, in the recognition of the
fathers by the sons, but even more forcefully in the recognition of the
sons by the fathers.
In this regard, the essential scene is perhaps the confrontation between
the two possible fathers of the hero, who are both, as their tattoos show,
survivors of deportation and extermination. On one side we have the
real father, the German musician who wants to forgetin Americathe
historic destiny of the Jews. On the other side we have the true father,
the asylums craziest old man, guardian of the depths of the earth (Well

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