Broken Wings: Israeli beauty

Broken Wings sends its soap opera plot soaring

By Anthony Allison

Judging by the depressing daily headlines, life in Israel is sheer hell--a never-ending fight for survival in a horrific war zone riven by Palestinian suicide bombings and Israeli army reprisals.

But if ever there's proof that you shouldn't believe everything you read, and mustn't accept TV's tunnel-vision view as anything but narrow, warped and misleading, it's Broken Wings.

Nir Bergman's assured first feature is a welcome reminder that there's much more happening in Israel than sensational, superficial news reports can ever reveal. In that troubled land, life, love and some truly inspired filmmaking do still go on.

At first glance, the storyline of this 2002 movie, about a grieving widow struggling to raise four children, sounds like the most mundane soap opera. But thanks to wonderfully expressive performances by stage star Orli Zilberschatz-Banai as the embattled matriarch, Nitai Gvirtz as her disaffected teenage son and newcomer Maya Maron as her wannabe musician daughter, Broken Wings soars far above the usual triteness. Like American Beauty, this family drama finds profound truth in seemingly shallow, everyday existence.

Furthermore, if you read Bergman's plot, about a family abruptly brought crashing to Earth by the sudden death of its beloved patriarch, as an allegorical riff on a nation whose wings were similarly clipped when it lost its father figure, with the Nov. 4, 1995, assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Broken Wings takes on a truly heart-rending resonance.

Still mourning her husband's unexpected death, nine months earlier, fortysomething midwife Dafna Ulman (Zilberschatz-Banai) throws herself into hard work on the night shift at a Haifa hospital, abdicating most of the child-care responsibilities for her youngest kids, 11-year-old Ido and 6-year-old Bahr (Daniel and Eliana Magon) to her daughter, Maya (Maron), a budding singer-songwriter.

As the talented 17-year-old tells older bandmate Yoram (Danny Niv) and childhood sweetheart Gaga (Nimrod Cohen) that she's quitting the band, her 16-year-old brother, high school dropout Yair (Gvirtz), reveals that he too has abandoned his (hoop) dreams of becoming a Middle Eastern Michael Jordan. Instead, the gifted basketball player has adopted a nihilistic philosophy ("There is no God, no truth and no meaning to your bony existence,") that matches the prospects of his dead-end job, handing out fliers in a mouse costume, and alienates his girlfriend, Iris (Dana Ivgy).

While Dafna rejects the gentle overtures of a sympathetic doctor (Vladimir Freedman), and Bahr's insecurity manifests itself in chronic bed-wetting, Ido copes with school bullies by developing self-destructive behavior of his own. When Maya forgets to pick up Bahr from school, the scene is set for more tragedy.

In 2001, Dover Kosashvili made a bittersweet, earthy debut, Late Marriage, in which a philosophy student's Georgian immigrant parents insist on finding him a wife, unaware that he's already found his soulmate, an older single mom. Last year, documentarian Ra'anan Alexandrowicz made an equally striking first feature, James' Journey to Jerusalem, a cynical satire about a would-be pilgrim who learns that life in the Holy Land is not exactly the uplifting dream his religious teaching had promised.

Like them, Bergman, a 33-year-old documentarian and TV director, created a feature debut that's mature, perceptive and refreshingly frank about the failings of contemporary Israeli society. Broken Wings could, perhaps, have been an unremittingly grim portrait of a country whose Zionist-homeland hopes and socialist-kibbutzim ideals have gotten hopelessly lost amid the daily struggles of violent intifada and killer capitalism. But with an ending that feels neither forced nor manipulative, Broken Wings paradoxically takes flight on a heady updraft of optimism. Despite everything, there is hope that the Ulman family, like their troubled nation, will eventually have a bright future.