For her feature directing debut, Black Swan actor Natalie Portman has shepherded through a sombrely reverential adaptation of Amos Oz’s 2002 memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, a study of the founding of the state of Israel refracted through Oz’s troubled family life. Portman, who was born in Israel and who lived there until she was three, before her family moved to the US, has taken a brave decision to take on such potentially contentious material – and while the resulting film is perhaps a tad on the conventional-looking side, it has an unusual, and possibly unique, perspective on Israeli psychology, and Portman demonstrates she possesses a confident grasp of film-making fundamentals.
Oz, of course, is Israel’s most celebrated contemporary novelist, a humane, left-of-centre figure who is unswervingly devoted to upholding Zionism, and who went on to see combat in the six day war and the Yom Kippur war after the events of this film – which finish as he joins a kibbutz in his mid-teens – are over. He is made effectively the narrator of the film – though, rather disappointingly, doesn’t play the current, elderly version of himself – ruminating like a secular rabbi on linguistic derivations of modern Hebrew, his family’s state of mind, and the power of the Zionist dream.
Portman’s film picks up the story in 1945: Oz is an eight-year-old boy, and his parents Arieh and Fania are nervously observing the increasing tensions between Jews and Arabs in Mandate Palestine. An early scene shows us Oz’s own preference for a two-state solution: little Amos is hauled by his uncle to a party at a friendly Palestinian neighbour, and precociously explains to the little Arab girl he meets in the back garden that “there is room for two peoples in this land”. However, an unfortunate accident to another, younger, kid shows the prickliness and paranoia that lies beneath the surface.
When war comes, as it inevitably does, it is necessarily shown exclusively from the Jewish side: there is little room for doubt here that Arabs are the aggressors, and that Jewish nationhood after the brutalities of the pogroms and the Holocaust is the only way forward. That, certainly, is the mainstream Jewish view to this day; however, Oz’s implication that his mother’s foreboding and dread – even before the 1948 war gets under way, and in stark contrast to his father’s bullish espousal of nationalist sentiment – is a prefiguring of Israel’s future of violence, splintering and moral uncertainty: Faina herself uses the word “abyss”. The conclusion is underscored in the very final scenes, when a teenage Oz emerges from his kibbutz, astride a tractor, and to all appearances the hardened pioneer of his mother’s fantasies. But, says Oz, change is illusory, and “a fulfilled dream is a disappointed dream”. It’s a remarkably downbeat analysis of the Israeli project.
Portman herself plays Fania: it’s a controlled, queenly performance, her intense glamour remaining entirely intact even during Fania’s most raddled moments. Homely, bespectacled Arieh (Gilad Kahana) and even glum little Amos (Amir Tessler) are inevitably overshadowed by Portman’s near-radioactive screen presence. But its on her achievement as a director that her role in this film will be judged, and it’s accurate to say she has done an impressive job, easily the equal of Angelina Jolie, who went similarly serious for her first feature, the Bosnian war drama In the Land of Blood and Honey. Portman has made a film with something serious and interesting to say about Israel, a nuanced portrait of the place that demonstrates a commitment to, and connection with, her home country. This is an assured, heartfelt debut.
