The Retrospective
Novelist Yehoshua rewards readers patient enough to excavate layers of text and shift tempo. At the bedrock of Israeli filmmaker Yasir Moses, estranged screenwriter Trigano, and their common muse Debdou (Ruth)’s love triangle, we strike inherited imagery’s uniting and dividing powers. In Spain, a laudatory retrospective of early films unfolds at a sluggish pace, promising no dramatic developments yet able to sustain tension. The action rises in Israel when Moses travels back to filming locations: a village on Gaza’s border, his parents’ prominently located Jerusalem house. Risking rocket fire, he seeks reconciliation with Trigano, who haunts him like an amputee’s stump. A priest descended from inquisitors casts struggling Muslim immigrants and rural Spaniards for a once abandoned scene, the screenwriter’s condition for truce. But reimagining art requires echoes and fresh compositions; multiple camera angles are metaphors for differing moral perspectives on this undertaking. Moses the elder must fulfill his student’s belief: Art makes the disgraceful beautiful and the repulsive meaningful. With beautiful wordsmanship, Yehoshua entangles dignity and humiliation, repugnance and rapture, showing us how difficult they become to distinguish. --Cynthia-Marie OBrien