An Urban Legend for Adults
By Goel Pinto
It was strange to see director Dan Wolman walking among the half-dressed, drunk men at a House music party for homosexuals in Tel Aviv’s Powder Club last year. Dancer Ido Tadmor accompanied Wolman, who looked lost but curious. He kept looking right and left, examining the partygoers and smiling his embarrassed smile. Several hours later, a strange, old woman looking confused and lost appeared among the drunk dancers. Wolman followed her, this time with a camera, and directed a scene in which the woman was the heroine.
"Tied Hands" which was conceived in that club, will premiere today in different parts of the country. It takes place in the course of one night and focuses on the story of a mother who is trying to make amends for her absence from her dying son’s life. Gila Almagor, who portrays the mother, is at the height of her splendor in this film. She plays the role of a bourgeois woman who has lived all of her life in the shadow of a domineering man. She goes on a night-time journey in search of marijuana to ease her son’s pain, but all she has is her gaze. Her gaze is at once confused and curious, and tries to conceal her feelings and thoughts as she uncovers the different layers of her son’s world.
This is Ido Tadmor’s first role in a long feature film, and he looks like a wounded bird. Throughout the movie there are scenes of him dancing, almost naked, using his body as an artist would his paintbrush. The memory of these scenes makes his death even more poignant and painful, as he lies still, unable to move any longer.
The unmentionable
The word ’AIDS’ is never mentioned in the movie. "That’s how I do it," says Wolman. "Whoever sees the movie will know what we are talking about. But for me, the illness is merely a metaphor for a boy who grew up in a family that was supposed to protect him but in fact betrayed him. And in one night, the mother who is living with the son she doesn’t know at all, tries to do something that will turn her into his mother."
Wolman conjured up the idea for the movie 15 years ago when he went to visit the director Amos Gutman a month before he died of AIDS. "Gutman’s mother opened the door for me to his apartment in Ramat Gan and the air was filled with a strong scent of ’grass.’ I entered his room, and he was so very thin, he looked like a transparent bean sprout. He hugged me and suggested I smoke a joint with him. I don’t smoke regularly but in the 1960s in New York I had smoked and it was great, like drinking alcohol, but I had moved away from that. He took out rolling paper, put the stuff in it and licked the paper, and I remember that his saliva was as thick as the resin of a pine tree. He gave it to me to smoke and we smoked together. It was a friendly farewell pipe between the two of us."
After Gutman died, Wolman started thinking about a movie that followed the journey of a mother seeking marijuana for her sick son. At first he thought it was best to make a made-for-TV movie, but with the years - particularly in view of the deaths of other people he knew from the same illness, including his sister’s son, who died of AIDS at the age of 19 - he decided to delve deeper into the story. "I asked my sister for permission," he says. "I told her that only if she gave me the go-ahead would I make the movie, and she agreed."
"Tied Hands" is a complicated film that does not take a stance on what is right and wrong or who is guilty and who is moral. True, the attitude toward the mother is critical since she did not support her son when he was young and his artist father would tie his hands so that he would not have to see his effeminate movements. But even she in the end wins redemption and can even be forgiven. On the other hand, despite the son’s suffering, he too is no saint and sometimes is portrayed in an unsympathetic light.
"When I began writing," Wolman says, "it was clear to me that the son was the victim. Society does not accept him, even his father does not accept him, and unjustly so on his part. But when I was writing the script, I gradually began to feel empathetic toward the mother. She collaborated with the father who was revolted by his son’s sexuality, but she too acted with her hands bound. That is why I gave her a chance: Just as the son would go out at night to find little bits of affection and love in other places, so now she, this very respectable woman, goes out into the night in search of drugs."
During the search, she encounters a youth who studied with her son at the boarding school he was sent to, because his father was always busy with exhibiting his works in Europe and America. The youth tells her that their classmates had sexually abused her son and then takes her to a dance club. After that, she visits Independence Park in Tel Aviv, gets arrested by the police and spends time drinking coffee with prostitutes. When blood drips down the mother’s neck, one of the prostitutes says to her: "Did they rape you? Never mind. I get raped every night."
Dissatisfied parents
It is interesting to see the way Wolman portrays Independence Park in Tel Aviv, which suddenly looks like an enchanted wood straight out of Shakespeare’s "Midsummer Night’s Dream," filled with fairies and enchanted creatures that do not have the urges of all of those deserted men.
"My story is an urban legend," says Wolman. "It is like the story in which the prince goes to find a flower that will save his mother. For me, Independence Park is not hell; it has a great deal of poetry, sadness and loneliness and that is how I presented it.’"
He adds: "My world is divided. On the one hand, I feel an attraction for and closeness to the world of the night, and on the other hand, I’m a family man."
Wolman was always intrigued by the nuclear family. Even if he appears to deal with a different subject in every film, the same emphasis on family is in them all. For example, in "My Michael," the screen adaptation of Amos Oz’s book about a married couple, and in "Foreign Sister," which deals with an Israeli bourgeois family that takes in a foreign worker from Ethiopia.
"I would so much like to make a movie consisting of vibrant material that would draw in the crowds," Wolman says, "but something pulls me away to continue making my kind of films."
Another kind of leitmotif in his films is the strict attitude, the lack of satisfaction displayed by parents toward their children. "When I examine my films, even "Soldier of the Night" in which the father gives his son a Spartan education and is then disappointed in him, the parents never come out well. When I look at my own parents, my father is 91 and my mother is 87, they are both alive and I’m currently making a documentary film about them, I find that they were always charming people who never purposely hurt me. But it is true that even now, at the age of 64, I still feel like a child. Perhaps the fact that I was born during World War II and the fact that, in the first five years of my life, my father (who joined the British army and was sent to Ethiopia) was hardly ever at my side, is connected to this. But that is not just my story. It is the story of all of those from my generation. Parents then were very busy with the struggle to establish a state."
Perhaps Wolman has not enjoyed the good fortune of having millions of viewers, but he was always blessed with the real admiration that was his due. His first movie, "The Dreamer," released in 1970, was entered in the Cannes Film Festival. His second film, "Floch," was entered in the Venice Film Festival, and he is also the only Israeli director to have won the Volgin Prize for the best feature film at the Jerusalem Film Festival twice, for "The Distance" and "Foreign Sister."
"When I make a movie, I’m sure the whole world will see it," he says. "I’m convinced it will touch the audience, that they will laugh, cry and feel excited about it. I always have hopes, but even when only a few thousand people see it in the cinemas, it makes me happy because it is like a poet who puts out a book of poetry that is bought by a few hundred people. What is certain, as in the movie, "The Biography of Ben" for example, is that its shelf life will be much longer than a movie which attracted hundreds of thousands of people to the box office. And there will be those who will see it in another 50 years also. "
But the truth is that Wolman’s films are not blockbusters, not because they are not interesting, and "Tied Hands" proves once again that Wolman is indeed a communicative director, but because there is no real basis in Israel for marketing and distributing quality movies. "The Biography of Ben," for example, his previous film, was first shown at the Jerusalem Film Festival in July 2003 but was distributed only a year and a half later, in November 2004. True, "Tied Hands" is going to be screened in cinemas two months after it premiered at the Jerusalem Film Festival, but once again it was Wolman who had to do all the work by himself. In addition to the script and the direction, he is also the film’s producer and even its distributor. "I always had the feeling that the producer pocketed too much money at the expense of the production," he says.
Perhaps the next step will be the realization of Wolman’s dream: to set up a screening room of his own. "There are not enough theaters here for quality films," he says. "Why should I not have a theater that shows my films? I’ll take a basement with chairs and a projector that will be Danny Wolman’s Cinema. Why not? That’s my dream. It’s like when I arrived in the United States in the ’60s and Andy Warhol had a theater, and there was even a movie house inside a church where they showed films on the ceiling in the afternoons and people lay on mattresses and looked up. I’ll screen my movies and the other movies that I like."
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