Rhapsodies

Now that the holiday is over, I thought I’d try and get as far away from that sort of thing as possible. In this case, I thought I’d try spy thrillers featuring the Mossad. 

For better or for worse, whether it’s because they are perceived as the first line of defense in the “War on Terrorism”, or as hunters of Nazi war criminals, I think our media has a tendency to romanticize the Mossad. So I thought it would be informative to see what Isreal’s film industry thought of them. 

The first film on my list, Eytan Fox’s Walk on Water (original Hebrew title: ???? ?? ????; English transliteration: Lalekhet Al HaMayim)  tells the story Eyal, a Mossad agent (Lior Ashkenazi) After a successful hit on an alleged terrorist in Istanbul, he comes home to discover his wife had committed suicide. Still recovering from this he is assigned to investigate a German tourist named Axel Himmelman, (Knut Berger) who has traveled to Israel to visit his sister, Pia who is now (Caroline Peters) living in a kibbutz. The siblings are the grandchildren of a war criminal who had fled to Argentina after the war but has now disappeared. Eyal’s superior’s suspect that the siblings may have a lead on where he has gone to. 

As the weeks of Axel’s visit continues, Eyal finds himself annoyed by Axel’s idealism. But gradually finds himself drawn to him.

While well done, I’m afraid I was mostly not the target audience, so my main reaction was meh. Still, it was an interesting perspective on the wonderfully complicated mess that is the state of modern Israel. While there were several arguments for and against, since our main point of view character who is extremely biased and extremely bitter we are given a very skewed view. 

The next film on my list, Assaf Bernstein ’s Ha-Hov, aka HaChov, The Debt tells of Rachel (Gila Almago) a former Mossad agent who, thirty years ago was part of a team responsible for hunting down and killing Nazi war criminal Dieter Vogel (a.k.a. the Surgeon of Birkenau) and is now is resting on her laurels with a successful signing tour of her memoirs. However, when one of her associates form the mission reappears with newly acquired data of  a man in a nursing home in Kiev claiming to be the surgeon. Now they have to go to Kiev, before anyone else finds out about this, investigate and, if he turns out to be who he says he is, finish the job. 

Thus we follow on her mission while also viewing the original mission and through flashbacks find out what went wrong in the first place. 

I’m not sure what I thought of this film. It was tense and well paced and very depressing, but like the other film I’m afraid I really wasn’t it’s target audience. Still, I liked how the flashbacks worked with two sets of casts to play our principal characters for both the past and pressent, and how our heroes, in their present, question their deeds and if anything they did was the right thing.