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June 9, 2006
The roles women play
Free Zone explores the meaning of borders.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
The opening shot is a sustained close-up: several minutes of a
young American woman named Rebecca (Natalie Portman, looking decidedly
unglamorous) sobbing inconsolably in the back of a cab with rain-slicked
windows, as Chava Alberstein's extended mix of "Chad Gadya,"
with its imagery of sacrificial lambs, swells in the background
– mingled with the multi-ethnic sounds of Jerusalem's Old City.
With mascara smeared across her face, Rebecca – who has just
broken up with her Israeli fiancé – asks her taxi driver
to take her somewhere, anywhere.
A disembodied voice from the front of the cab tells her, "I
can't take you. I have somewhere to go. It's not for passengers."
"I'll be invisible," says Rebecca.
"I have a really serious family business."
"Yeah, I have a really serious family business, too."
"I have to cross the border today," says the cab driver.
"I have to get out of this country," Rebecca insists.
"I'm going to take you on a long journey."
"I'm ready."
So begins the latest film from Israeli director Amos Gitai. Hanna,
the cab driver, is on her way to the so-called Free Zone –
the vast used car market lying between the borders of Jordan, Iraq,
Syria and Saudi Arabia – to collect a large sum of money from
her husband's Palestinian business partner.
Gitai – the director of such challenging films as Kadosh
and Kippur – is widely known for his (not always welcome)
left-leaning views. He has been accused, in the past, of using his
films as a means of furthering his own polemic. This movie, too,
contains its share of political jabs: the Israeli border guards
who make lewd remarks about Rebecca and threaten to take Hanna's
car apart; the Jordanian guards who wave them through with a smile.
The Palestinian, known as the "American," relays a tale
of what he sees as deceit on the part of the Israeli government.
His partner, Leila, tells Rebecca, "You know, it's important
to speak the language of your enemy. Maybe if the Israelis spoke
Arabic the way Palestinians speak Hebrew, there wouldn't be such
a problem."
But there is also infighting among the Palestinians themselves and
exasperation, on Hanna's part, regarding daily life in her beloved
country. Her father, she explains, came to Israel from Germany.
She and her husband relocated from their settlement in Yamit to
the Negev, trying repeatedly to make a living – but, "The
only thing Israel can be sure of," she tells Rebecca wearily,
"is the intifada."
Often described as having a nouvelle vague style, Gitai layers flashbacks
on top of highway scenes, with silences taking up as much room as
chatter. Woven throughout the story are issues of identity and belonging,
set against the grey backdrop of a seemingly pointless road trip.
"All my films," Gitai once said in an interview, "focus
on exile, be it inner exile or the exile of a people displaced in
space and time."
And yet there is a sense of belonging among the film's three
principal characters; three headstrong women who form a bond despite
themselves, with Rebecca, the American, half-Jewish young woman
who feels like she doesn't belong anywhere, as intermediary. Both
Hanna and Leila can't help but feel maternal towards her –
and, on occasion, display sisterly behavior towards each other.
It is this element of Free Zone that rings most true, perhaps
aided by the fact that Gitai shares writing credits with a woman
(Marie-José Sanselme). Hanna Laslo won the best actress award
at Cannes for her portrayal of Hanna.
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