Ahed’s Knee – Latest Hollywood & Bollywood Movies Review

Israeli director Nadav Lapid’s fourth feature is an imaginatively photographed psychodrama about a director’s artistic and emotional crisis, done in the spirit of such navel-gazing classics as “8 1/2,” “All That Jazz,” “Day for Night,” and “Contempt.” That probably makes the film sound simplistic and purely imitative, coming at the top of a review, but it isn’t meant that way. “Ahed’s Knee” is a fascinating movie that evades most complaints of not having anything to say by showcasing its characters struggling to attach justifications and explanations to free-floating anxieties that have to do with a lot of things.

“Ahed’s Knee” observes a mesmerizing but arrogant artist as he moves through the world and delves into his psyche. The script’s fixation on the life and personal problems of the director, who is identified only as Y (Avshalom Pollak), is a binding agent, unifying what might otherwise be a bag of of half-formed political observations and quasi-poetic musings on Israel, its people, their antagonistic relationship with Palestinians and Syrians and nearly everyone else in the region, as well as the topography of Israeli desert landscapes, which are so strikingly envisioned they seem to pulse with a life force of their own. 

The movie’s countless virtuoso flourishes, as well as its tendency to let the hero convince us he’s the most interesting person in any given room by being as manic, blabber-mouthed, and petulantly domineering as possible, is a feature of “Ahed’s Knee,” not a bug. Lapid acknowledges how irritating Y can be by showing other characters marveling at his self-absorption, and by shooting some of his behavior in manner that suggests a toddler pouting melodramatically after being told what he cannot do. It’s hard to imagine that there’s not a withering self-critique behind this characterization, which is embodied by Pollak in such a soft-spoken yet entitled manner that makes Y seem like a man who saw “8 1/2” at an impressionable age and decided he could be as cool as Marcello Mastroianni, especially if he got the right pair of sunglasses (see photo at the top of this review). 

The movie follows Y as he works on a video installation partly inspired by the story of a teenaged Palestinian girl who was jailed for slapping an Israeli soldier. He then attends a screening of one of his movies at a library in an isolated desert community, where his contact is Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a beautiful young woman who organized the event because she loves Y’s films. Unfortunately for Y, she also happens to work for Israel’s ministry of culture, an organization which—according to Y—determines “which books and plays are shown in Israel, and which writers, directors, or artists appear [in public] or stay home.” 

You’d expect “Ahed’s Knee” to make more of that last thing than it ultimately does, but there’s a lot going on in this film. It all leads back to Y, who guides us through the film and sometimes “narrates” it in first person, by talking over images that represent flashbacks to his past and fantasies or stray thoughts he has in the moment. Sometimes he puts us inside his head and uses the camera to show us what he’s looking at, as if we have become him. 

Lapid, who has a confident, expressive and constantly evolving visual style, even devises a technique here that feels wholly new: he starts a handheld shot with a closeup of the hero thinking, then whips it over to the face of another character, a significant object, or just some general phenomenon that his director’s mind finds interesting, such as the way pavement rushes by in a blur as you’re driving on a desert road. 

There’s also a long sequence towards the middle of the film where Y tells Yahalom about disturbing incident that occurred when he was in the army during the war with Syria and his unit was trained to obediently swallow cyanide capsules rather than risk being captured and tortured by the enemy. The lighting and camerawork in these “flashbacks” has a slightly different feel than everything else in the movie, and might make you wonder whose mind we’re in: possibly Yahalom’s, which would mean that the movie has so much confidence in its distinctively all-over-the-place technique (cinematographer Shai Goldman and editor Nili Feller, both brilliant, amplify beauty while keeping the proverbial wheels from falling off the wagon) that it feels empowered to enter the minds of characters other than the hero and then return us to whence we came. 

The central incident in Y’s war story plays as if the directed had merged incidents from two works of fiction, Andre Malraux’s La Condition Humaine and Albert Camus’ “The Guest,” but like a lot of plot elements in “Ahed’s Knee”—including the relationship between Y and Yahalom, which progresses in a series of two shots where the actors’ faces are so very close together that you expect them to start making out—this one doesn’t pay off as you might expect. 

Overall, “Ahed’s Knee” is, to paraphrase a great line from “The Limey,” less of a story than a vibe, but what a vibe it is. There’s really only one fully developed character in the film, and that’s the director. This perhaps constrains the movie from being an all-time classic—even Fellini, Truffaut, Fosse, and Godard took care to surround their self-absorbed leads with lively supporting players who seemed to have lives of their own when they weren’t onscreen—but nevertheless, you can’t say that the director didn’t do it on purpose. Y is somebody who sees others as a means to an end. Even when he’s making a big show of being sensitive and a good listener and deeply interested in the stories they share with him, he’s still a culture vulture looking for scraps of experience he can turn into an arresting image or an engrossing plot. 

More than one sequence departs from the movie’s stylistic baseline, a tough and gritty, international-indie-flick version of “reality,” and becomes as glossy and visceral as a Michael Bay action film (such as the opening motorcycle sequence, set on rainy highways and streets). Other sequences use needle-drop music cues to set up surreal music videos and impromptu dance numbers. This movie dances. It’s fun to watch even at its most disturbing, and never funnier than when its hero seems mortified by the possibility that his own troubles aren’t the center of the universe.

Now playing in select theaters.