‘Shikun’: Berlin Review

Dir: Amos Gitai. Israel/France/Italy/Brazil/UK. 2024. 85mins

French-Romanian author Eugene Ionesco’s celebrated 1959 play Rhinoceros was an indignant, sardonic parable concerning the rise of Fascism. Amos Gitai’s free transposition of the textual content to present-day Israel might nicely be indignant and sardonic, however it’s so weighed down by collected layers of stagey metaphor and allusion that, apart from a number of lucid moments, it’s troublesome to inform.

 Weighed down by collected layers of stagey metaphor and allusion 

Shikun makes use of the dilapidated stays of mid-to-late twentieth century Israeli structure and city planning because the stage for a collection of walk-on monologues. One unnamed character, performed by French-Swiss actress Irene Jacob, recurs as a sort of Cassandra refrain, lamenting, in French to some unidentified ‘you’, the state of the nation she has discovered right here. Amongst her first phrases are “I’m made indignant by what’s happening right here”.

We wait patiently for elucidation. However, over the following 80 minutes, it comes solely briefly flashes that pierce by way of a mist of seemingly unconnected vignettes. Probably in Israel, the sight of a Scout marching band enjoying ’Superb Grace’ in an underground automotive park could have the viewers nodding sagely, or weeping tears of laughter. Bemused bafflement would appear to be the most certainly response to a lot of the remainder of Gitai’s unfocused satire.

Ionesco’s play was set in a provincial French city whose inhabitants, after initially dismissing a rhinoceros invasion – or denying that it’s taking place – step by step start to show into the horned ungulates themselves. Written at a time when authoritarianism was as soon as once more on the rise, solely 14 years after the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini, it was each absurd and trenchant.

Gitai reportedly conceived this free adaptation earlier than the brutal October 7 Hamas assault on Israel and the nation’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, in response to prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s broadly criticised makes an attempt to reform Israel’s judicial system and curb the legislative energy of the Supreme Court docket. It might equally apply to the present state of Israel, during which army power has all however silenced the protests that had threated to topple the federal government. However so intensely literary and aulic are many of the strains delivered right here that they may very well be handily retrofitted to an enormous vary of future ills. Having many of the audio system in continuous movement – dancing like Jacob, strolling, operating, zooming round on electrical scooters – does little to make the drama any much less static.

Gitai educated as an architect earlier than changing into a filmmaker. May the Brutalist settings of Shikun be his admonishment that these monuments of Israel’s optimistic growth years of the Nineteen Fifties and Nineteen Sixties have grow to be repressive cages? The movie’s first half is dominated by a single uncut sequence filmed within the ‘Quarter Kilometre Constructing’, in-built 1958 in Beersheba, a brand new city that was planted in the course of the Negev desert. Within the open walkway that runs alongside an higher ground, Jacob passes the narrative baton to a collection of different walk-ons: a struggle veteran, an architect and developer arguing concerning the siting of a brand new synagogue; a pair of orthodox Jews discussing an organized marriage; a girl who’s instructing Hebrew to a category of Jewish immigrants from locations like Belarus, India and Ukraine.

Are these Jewish incomers the rhinos? Are they Israeli Arabs just like the character performed by Bahira Ablassi, who sits in a basement workshop fashioning rhino horns? Are they these turncoat liberals who’ve swallowed the bitter authoritarian capsule within the pursuits of nationwide unity?

The few moments of viewers engagement on provide in Shikun have little to do with line supply. When Hanna Laszlo – who gained the Finest Actress award at Cannes in 2005 for her efficiency in Gitai’s Free Zone – reads out fragments of textual content written by kids within the notorious Theresianstadt Ghetto, the whole lot feels actual for a short second. The same flare-up of emotional reality comes when, in a scene set within the bowels of the Tel Aviv bus station (one of many largest on this planet), a jogging younger lady speaks phrases borrowed from Israeli journalist Amira Hass: “Maybe the day will come when an entire era of younger Israelis will ask their dad and mom: ‘How might you?’”. If we hear up then, it’s as a result of the phrases themselves demand it.