America (the Movie)

If you’re the kind of person who watches films from Israel, you might bring a set of fixed expectations. Whatever film you see will deal with “ha-Matzav,” The Situation. That means the long and heartbreaking struggle for primacy between Palestinian nationalism and its Israeli counterpart. The film may complicate your established views, but inevitably it will focus on deadly conflict.

Either that, or another kind of struggle, between faith and modernity, between the religious and the secular. If there is something else in the mix, it’s the clash between Eastern and Western. On one side, the fading Ashkenazi elite, and on the other an ascendant Middle Eastern majority. You could be forgiven for thinking that there are only two or three issues, and Israeli filmmakers are consumed by one of them.

Not so the plot of “America” by Ofir Grazier. Yotam and Eli, the two protagonists, are bound together by childhood trauma. The violence here is domestic abuse. Eli’s father is a brutish police chief who beats his wife until she shoots herself dead. He then transfers his rage to his grieving son.

The hero of the story is Yotam’s father, Moti, who rescues Eli and teaches him to swim. The two boys fall into a mysterious friendship which hints at an erotic attachment between them. We know that Eli has trafficked himself to earn enough money to remain independent of his father. You get the feeling that his relationship with Yotam is somehow a purifying counterpoise to his career on the streets.

Real heartbreak comes when Eli returns from America to Israel to settle his now dead father’s estate. The grown men visit a hidden spring, where Yotam falls and slips into a coma. The rest of the film traces his slow recovery and relations between each man and Yotam’s fiancee, Iris.

The film delicately, subtly parses these relationships and addresses the question of religiosity after all. Iris is an Ethiopian Jew, estranged from her deeply religious family. Like Yotam and Eli, she is also broken, but by a different circumstance from her fiance and lover. There is nothing overtly Jewish about this conflict. It could be about anyone who falls out with a traditional family.

But even if the film is not explicitly “Jewish,” it is also, in a sense, deeply Israeli. The soundtrack is a melange of Zionist oldies which repeatedly reference the beauty of the Land. Grazier believes with a kind of mystical pantheism in the healing power of the Israeli landscape, that its hills and valley give life to its inhabitants. Iris is elevated by her work in horticulture. Eli wants his inherited yard to be a garden.

Water, itself, may be a lethal force, but it also confers joy and recovery. As my wife, Alice, pointed out, it is the place where the protagonists go for restoration or prove their quiet moral heroism. Eli’s death is reported in the final scenes , but it comes from saving a child from the waves. Even if he cannot rescue himself, he brings an innocent boy out of the depths he has experienced.