Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s fourth feature is an imaginatively directed psychodrama about a director's artistic and emotional crisis, done in the spirit of such navel-gazing auteurist classics as "8 1/2," "All That Jazz," "Day for Night," and "Contempt." That probably makes it sound simplistic and purely imitative, coming at the top of a review, but the comment isn't intended that way. "Ahed's Knee" is a fascinating movie that evades most complaints of not having anything to say by showcasing its characters struggling to explain free-floating anxieties that have to do with a lot of things. It's also stylish as hell.

"Ahed's Knee" observes a gifted narcissist as he moves through the world and delves into his own psyche. The script's fixation on the life and personal problems of the director, who is identified only as Y (Avshalom Pollak), is a binding agent, unifying what might otherwise be a bag of of half-formed political observations and quasi-poetic musings on Israel, its people, and their antagonistic relationship with Palestinians and Syrians and nearly everyone else in the region, as well as the topography of Israeli desert landscapes, which are so strikingly envisioned they seem to shimmer with a life force.

The movie's countless virtuoso flourishes, as well as its tendency to let the hero convince us he's the most interesting person in any given room by being as manic, blabber-mouthed, and diva-esque as possible, is a feature of "Ahed's Knee," not a bug. Lapid acknowledges how irritating Y can be by shooting some of his behavior in a manner that suggests a toddler pouting after being told what he cannot do. It's hard to imagine that there's not a self-critique in this character, who is embodied by Pollak as an entitled person who thinks being soft-spoken can hide his off-putting qualities and make him seem mysterious and deep when most of the time he's kinda faking it. He could be a man who saw "8 1/2" at an impressionable age and decided he could be as cool as Marcello Mastroianni, especially if he got the right pair of sunglasses (see photo at the top of this review). 

The movie follows Y as he works on a video installation partly inspired by the story of a teenaged Palestinian girl who was jailed for slapping an Israeli soldier. He then attends a screening of one of his movies at a library in an isolated desert community, where his contact is Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a beautiful young woman who organized the event because she loves Y's films. Unfortunately for Y, Yahalom also works for Israel's ministry of culture, an organization which—according to Y—determines "which books and plays are shown in Israel, and which writers, directors, or artists appear [in public] or stay home," thereby controlling their creative and financial lives. 

You'd expect "Ahed's Knee" to make more of that last thing than it ultimately does, but there's a lot going on in this film. It all leads back to Y, who guides us through the tale and sometimes "narrates" it in first person, by talking over images that represent flashbacks to his past and fantasies or stray thoughts he has in the moment. Sometimes the film puts us inside Y's head and uses the camera to show us what he's looking at, as if we have become him. 

Lapid, who has a confident, expressive and constantly evolving visual style, even devises a technique here that feels new: he starts a handheld shot with a closeup of the hero thinking, then whips it over to a closeup of another character, a significant object, or just some general phenomenon that his director's mind finds interesting, such as the way pavement rushes by in a blur as you're driving on a desert road. These "point-of-view" shots are typically angled in a way that suggests that we're looking through Y's eyes, but then when the shot finally returns to Y, we're looking at him. It's like when an omniscient novel switches from third-person to first-person and back.

There's also a long sequence in film's midsection where Y tells Yahalom about a disturbing incident that occurred when he was in the army during the war with Syria: his unit was trained to obediently swallow cyanide capsules rather than risk being captured and tortured. The lighting and camerawork in these "flashbacks" has a slightly different feel than everything else in the movie, to the extent that you might wonder whose mind we're in: possibly Yahalom's, which would mean that the movie has so much confidence in its distinctively all-over-the-place technique that it feels empowered to enter the minds of characters other than the hero, then return us to whence we came. (Cinematographer Shai Goldman and editor Nili Feller, both brilliant, amplify beauty while preventing the proverbial wheels from falling off the wagon.) 

The central incident in the hero's war story plays as if Y had merged incidents from two works of fiction, Andre Malraux's La Condition Humaine and Albert Camus' "The Guest." But like a lot of plot elements in "Ahed's Knee"—including the relationship between Y and Yahalom, which progresses in a series of shots in which the actors' faces are so close that you expect them to start making out—this one doesn't pay off as you might expect. (There's also a throwaway line from Yahalom suggesting that maybe she thinks the story was a lift from somebody else's work, but is too respectful of Y's distress to come right out and say it.)

Overall, "Ahed's Knee" is, to paraphrase a line from "The Limey," less of a story than a vibe, but what a vibe it is. There's really only one developed character in the film, the director. This constrains the "Ahe'd Knee" from being an all-time classic—even Fellini, Truffaut, Fosse and Godard took care to surround their full-of-it leads with colorful secondary figures who seemed to have lives of their own when they weren't onscreen—but nevertheless, you can't say that the director didn't mean to do it. Y is somebody who sees others as a means to an end. Even when he's making a show of being sensitive and a good listener, he's still a culture vulture looking for scraps of experience that he can turn into an arresting image or viable pitch. Even if his life crisis is genuine (and there's no reason to think it isn't), his way of dealing with it tends to obscure and deflect the real issues.

More than one sequence departs from the movie's stylistic baseline, a tough and gritty, international-indie-flick version of "reality," and becomes as glossily viscerally as a Michael Bay action film (such as the opening motorcycle ride across rainy highways and streets, huge flat raindrops quivering in place on the camera's lens). Other sequences use needle-drop music cues to set up surreal music videos and impromptu dance numbers. The whole movie seems to be dancing. It's fun to watch even at its most disturbing, and never funnier than when its hero seems mortified by the possibility that his own troubles aren't the center of the universe.

Now playing in select theaters.



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