Semi-Tough

Like A House in Jerusalem, Gitai’s black comedy Yom Yom, also completed in 1998, turns on the proposed sale of a house by Arabs to Jews. The second in a trilogy designed to shed light on the particular blends of life in each of Israel‘s three major cities (the first, 1996’s Devarim, about the dilemmas of middle-aged children of Israel‘s founders, is not included in the series), Yom Yom (Hebrew for ”every day“) is set in the director’s native Haifa and chronicles the misadventures of a hypochondriac baker, the offspring of a happy Jewish-Arab marriage, trying to find a direction in life as his parents struggle with whether to sell the bakery to the brash Jewish developer of a shopping mall. With its wry verite style and crowded ensemble of recognizably modern characters -- unmistakably Israeli, yet they could be living in any contemporary city -- Yom Yom is a real charmer.

I wish I could say the same for the trilogy‘s third movie, and arguably Gitai’s best-known film in the West. Kadosh (1999), a handsomely upholstered story of two sisters dealing with different forms of private and institutional violence against women in the ultra-Orthodox Me‘a Shearim quarter of Jerusalem, is a high-minded feminist diatribe against an all-too-easy target, an essentially medieval religious community that can’t reasonably be evaluated with late-20th-century secular skepticism.

The series ends on a high, if not a happy note with last year‘s Kippur, Gitai’s searing semiautobiographical drama about a patched-together unit of soldiers staggering their way through the mad chaos of the 1973 Yom Kippur War. When I asked him in an interview last December to assess the prospects for peace in his country, Gitai observed that peace will come when all parties have exhausted themselves. Weighed against current events, this extraordinary film is a sad witness to the exhaustion with which Israel has been living for a long time.