Gitai's New Ellipticism

Gitai’s New Ellipticism Jeanne Moreau in “One Day You’ll Understand.” by George Robinson Special To The Jewish Week At several key moments in Amos Gitai’s fascinating and compelling new film, “One Day You’ll Understand,” characters abruptly walk to a window and throw it open, leaning out to suck the air of the streets of Paris with the determination of someone who is drowning. And, indeed, they are, drowning in the tragedy of the Shoah as it played out in occupied France. The film, adapted from an autobiographical novel by Jerome Clement, centers on the reaction of the Bastien family to the memories raked up by the Klaus Barbie trial in 1987. Victor (Hippolyte Girardot) neglects his business as he becomes obsessed with tracing the family history of the Occupation and the round-ups that swept away his mother’s parents into the gas chambers of Auschwitz. Rivka, his mother (Jeanne Moreau), is simultaneously drawn to and repelled by the memories. (She is the first character to open a window, trying to escape from the sound of the Barbie trial on her television.) His sister Tania (Dominique Blanc) is accepting of everything that happened, even the discovery of a letter written by their father, a Catholic, declaring himself “an Aryan.” She rebuffs Victor’s anger, “This letter saved my life.” “One Day” is both a departure and a throwback for Gitai, arguably Israel’s most celebrated filmmaker. On the one hand, the film harkens back to his “Cities” trilogy (“Devarim,” “Yom Yom,” “Kadosh”), with their portrait of Israeli society as a claustrophobia-inducing zero-sum game. The Bastiens — half-Jewish, half-Catholic, scarred by the Holocaust, yet unable to be honest with themselves about the past — are as trapped by the past as the protagonists of the earlier films were by the present. But that is a theme that has been absent from Gitai’s most recent films. Where the long takes in the “Cities” trilogy (and, one should add, “Kedma”) froze their characters in the frame, more recent films like “Free Zone” and “Disengagement” offer a different visual context, with actors and camera movement alike permitting a more fluid relationship between on- and off-screen space. Despite the seemingly interminable back-and-forth of Middle East peace negotiations, Gitai’s most recent films set in Israel seem to be more optimistic in some fundamental way. Does that mean that Gitai’s optimism doesn’t extend to diaspora Jews and their frequently tortured history? I’m reluctant to push this interpretation too far. For one thing, “One Day” is a breathtakingly complicated piece of filmmaking and, on only one viewing, it would be a mistake to jump to conclusions. More important, “One Day” is a very different film from most of Gitai’s other fiction features, a departure, as I noted earlier, from the tone and narrative style of his previous work. Gitai’s fiction films are nothing if not emphatic. There are moments of intense conflict in his work that border on a kind of controlled hysteria, sort of a John Cassavettes- with-formal-discipline. One need only think back to “Disengagement,” with its lengthy takes of soldiers and settlers engaged in screaming shoving matches that look like a giant rugby scrum, or the demented 10-minute monologue that ends “Kedma.” But “One Day” is both low-key and elliptical. Despite the agonizingly high stakes, voices are never raised by the Bastiens, and what we learn of important plot elements like Victor’s neglect of his business is mostly indirect, even sketchy. This is a very different Gitai, cooler, more detached than usual. The single — and singular — exception is a sequence in which Victor imagines the terrible night in which his grandparents are caught in a rural sweep by the Nazis and French Milice collaborators. This five-minute tour de force, one of the most startling and powerful sequences in all of Gitai’s work, is a hectic, almost cryptic montage of jackbooted feet, terrified faces, swerving trucks, gun barrels, screams and moans. I can’t recall another sequence in Gitai’s work that is cut so fast on the eye, and there are few scenes in his films that carry a greater emotional charge. Coming, as it does, in the center of the film, the vivid contrast between this sequence and the ones that surround it makes this flashback all the more powerful. Despite that, it is the closing scene of the film that lingers in the memory most vividly, underlining its central concerns. After his mother’s death, Victor goes to the offices of a new bureaucracy in the French government established to set compensation for the families of the victims of the Nazis. Two blandly efficient and reasonably pleasant ladies are going through files on his family’s holdings in a dingy room filled with filing cabinets. Victor, suddenly stifled by emotion or lack of air or some other unknowable impulse, dashes out of the room, down a dark corridor to an open window, where he gulps for air. The camera tracks past him to show us a Parisian cityscape, including the lower half of the Eiffel Tower; one waits expectantly for Gitai to give in to the cliché and show us the entire structure but he holds the shot exactly as it is for a painfully long time. Then the camera pulls back, Victor no longer anywhere to be seen, and it recedes through the darkened hall once more. This final, dazzling coup de cinema seems to release Victor into the ether of the past, while leaving the audience trapped, for once, in the movement of history. Gitai is too young (58) and too active for viewers to reach any kind of definitive judgment on the trajectory of his career. But this much I am sure of: “One Day You’ll Understand” is a challenging and powerful film that speaks loudly in its silences and lacunae. And it is, I think, a watershed in what is by now one of the most singular careers in contemporary world cinema. n “One Day You’ll Understand,” directed by Amos Gitai, opens Friday, Oct. 31 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema (62nd Street and Broadway). For information, call (212) 757-0359. .

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