A Tale of Love and Darkness is Natalie Portman’s
adaptation of the memoir Amos Oz
published in 2004. Portman wrote, directed, and stars as Fania Mussman, the mother of a boy originally named
Amos Klausner who would grow up to become one of
the 20th century’s greatest writers.
After a
world premiere in May 2015 at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, A Tale of Love and Darkness opened in Israel,
and then played at multiple international film festivals (including Beijing,
Nashville, and Toronto). I saw it for the first time in January (2016) at the
New York Jewish Film Festival. I saw it a second time at a critics screening
here in New York last month.
I
consider this film a masterpiece… but you probably won’t hear many other film
critics say that. I am sure it is opening in theaters in the USA now because the
distributors are hoping for Oscar nominations, but I doubt there will be any.
Even though it was filmed in Hebrew with a predominately Israeli cast, it was not
especially well-received by the Israel Film Academy which announced nominees
for the 2016 Ophir Awards (aka “the Israeli Oscar”) last week.
As the
title makes clear, this is a very downbeat story. The narrator is an old man (Amos
Oz himself as played by actor Alexander
Peleg) who has spent a lifetime trying to understand the still incomprehensible
fact that his beautiful mother killed herself when he was barely twelve years
old.
From
the many strands of this dense book, Portman has braided together three. The
first is the story of two people – a woman from Poland and a man from Lithuania
– who both moved to Mandate Palestine just before the start of World War II,
only to learn soon after that almost everyone and everything they knew had been
obliterated in the Holocaust. The second is the related story of their attempt
to build a new life together in the Promised Land, only to discover that their
“land of milk and honey” was a rainy, chilly, embattled Jerusalem, quickly
engulfed by the flames of Israel’s War of Independence. The third focuses on one
boy who had these parents and lived at this time, seeking to ferret out the
earliest indications of the artist he would one day become.
Since
the memoir is well over 500 pages in length, A Tale of Love and Darkness could have been adapted for the screen
in many different ways, but this was clearly something of an obsession for
Portman. Like Oz himself, she wanted to know why Fania killed herself. I
suspect the answer to this question will always be elusive in every case, but I
was deeply moved by the depths to which Portman plunged, and I say this as
someone who was dismayed by the plot-driven suicides of female Holocaust
survivors in three recent films from Europe (Ida, Phoenix, and Sarah’s
Key).
Fania Mussman was raised in a prominent Polish family, so even though
she was Jewish, she expected a genteel life. As the prettiest of three sisters,
she assumed she would always be cared for and protected. Arriving in the Yishuv
as a teenager, she was filled with romantic idealism. But learning that everyone
she had grown up with was now gone trapped her in an emotional vise. On the one
hand Fania knew she was lucky to be alive, but on the other hand, she also knew
that just being alive did not, in itself, make her “happy” like she always
thought she would be.
Fania
tries so hard. The strain of her constant effort to be “normal” is exhausting
to watch. But that is all her young son Amos (Amir Tessler) can do, watch helplessly as his fragile
mother struggles day-by-day to keep going. No one else will even acknowledge the
problem, certainly not his father Arieh (Gilad Kahana) or any of the family members on
either side. The only person who appears to have any empathy for this family of
three is his father’s friend Israel Zarchi (Ohad Knoller). But since Zarchi was
a novelist/poet also afflicted with melancholia, his profession was to see what
others were determined to avoid.
All of
the technical elements of A Tale of Love
and Darkness are superb. The cinematography by Slawomir Idziak is elegant, especially in the many sequences in which
Fania weaves strange bedtime stories that transport her son to the edge of
mysticism. The production design by Arad Sawat, and set design by Noa Roshovsky and Salim Shehade (who have worked
on some of my favorite recent Israeli movies including A Place in Heaven, Footnote, and Restoration) combine to perfectly
evoke both the mundane and the magical. Casting director Hila Yuval clearly knows
everyone who is anyone, and highly-regarded Israeli actors who are used to playing
major roles add depth to tiny parts for Portman’s sake.
A Tale of Love and Darkness is one story of
displacement, documented with precision because this one woman had a son who
wanted to tell her story and was finally able to do so after years of inner torment.
But now Fania speaks for displaced people everywhere. Stop and think for a
moment about how it might feel to lose everything you know, end up on some foreign
shore, and then try to keep living “your” life. This is clearly one of the most
important issues of our era, and something with which we—as Jews—are intimately
familiar. We have been displaced time and again. We know the benefits, now we
must also acknowledge the costs.
As
Portman says in her “Filmmaker
Letter” on the Landmark website: “The immigrant experience of
idealizing the place you’re going to before you get there, and idealizing the
place you’ve left once you’re gone, is something many of us can relate to. And
the way the young Amos translates that longing into art through storytelling,
gives us something to aspire to.”
A Time of Love and Darkness opens at the
Landmark Theatre at Renaissance Place in Highland Park on Friday August 19. I
strongly urge you to ignore everything else you may hear about this film,
listen only to me, see it on a big screen, and make up your own mind. For
schedule information, visit the Landmark
website.
Top
Photo: Fania (Natalie Portman) struggles to give her son Amos (Amir Tessler) a normal life.
Bottom
Photo from Left: Arieh
(Gilad Kahana), Fania, Amos and Israel
Zarchi (Ohad Knoller) listen to the UN vote that gave birth to the State of
Israel on November 29, 1947.
Photo
Credits: © Ran Mendelson
