The writer and director of “Disengagement,” Amos Gitai (née Weintraub which is the same word in German) has a background in architecture and combat. Thus, the movie is a highly structured and logistic meditation on the importance of homelands. Leavened with eroticism and richly embellished details of place, it offends those who want only love stories to continue.
The introducing seduction scene is on a train where an Israeli man (Liron Levo) asks for a cigarette from a Palestinian woman who has a Dutch passport though she is not Dutch because Palestine is not granted the status of “nation,” in the same way that some tribes are not recognized as “tribes” by the US government. It’s all definitions that control entitlements. The hapless conductor who is checking passports is not sophisticated enough to sort this out, but finally gives up when the officer-status man protects the woman. The encounter, which began as a simple interlude, then becomes more intimate. It is a snapshot introduction to the film.
We never see the woman again, but the man, now traveling on foot, moves through small groups of evidently displaced people, perhaps refugees of some sort by improvised camps. He jumps fences, keeps moving. This “nomadism” (a Deleuzeguattarian concept) and displacement -- almost a component of disengagement, is a constant theme.
We go to a elegant but deteriorated French apartment where valuable objects (carved chairs with splendid but rotted upholstery) crowd rooms that seem to be on the verge of emptying to a warehouse or sales room. They are not arranged conventionally. In another smaller room a man lies on a bier, dead, while an African-American soprano sits by him singing. Popular symbols of Jewish religion, such a dreidels, hang from the ceiling. It seems an idiosyncratic presentation of personal religion for an independent man born in a Yiddish community in America, then taking refuge in Avignon. Religion in this film is song. But I never did decode the woman or her beautiful aria.
The man’s daughter, played by Juliette Binoche, is childlike. She is divorcing her husband, she says. He is as rich and white-haired as her father. (The funeral director pretends to introduce them to each other -- there is no emotional exchange.) But when the soldier shows up she is totally emotional -- volcanic, relieved, demanding, erotic. Though he resists her advances, it is clear that he loves her and will protect her silliness. He is her adopted brother and she tests his faithfulness to the conventions of family by trying to seduce him, but he IS faithful and instead of spending the night in the apartment, he goes to some kind of refuge packed with people of the street and lies down on the floor with them. Next day the sibs are dressed for the funeral but we do not see the ritual.
Instead comes a remarkable cameo by Jeanne Moreau as a lawyer. Was Jeanne ever “Marianne,” the fictional face of France? Moreau’s famous face has been punished by gravity, but she has lost no authority. The “key” premise is the will of the father which orders his estranged and damaged daughter to take the news of both death and will to HER daughter, now in a kibbutz that Israel has decided to order back inside the national borders. The daughter, who has quarreled with and resisted her father, now discovers that he has been a devoted grandfather to her own daughter, given up at birth. This movie will be about family versus family with every moral content ambiguous, arguable and incredibly painful. (Since I’m tying things back to Blackfeet, the parallel struggle now is between those who are enrolled -- one-quarter Blackfeet or more by family descent -- and their children who are not, which deprives them of rights and access to financial aid for college, loans and so on. There is another movement to open the enrollment, which further dilutes the original identity.)
After an industrial night-passage to get the plot-line to the Gaza strip, the rest of the story is witnessing the removal of the illegal Israeli settlers who refused to accept buy-outs to go back to Israel and declare they will not leave what they now claim as homeland. The Palestinians stand just outside the fence, declaring their own devotion and entitlement with poetry. Military, caught in the middle, do the best they can with an impossible situation. There are no “bad guys,” which probably confused those viewers expecting something more conventional. No explosions. Just big machinery. The daughter does find the granddaughter and they embrace whole-heartedly and physically connected, recognizing each other. By now the Binoche character has begun growing up. But then the story separates them again as the granddaughter is forcibly removed. The end is Binoche and her brother locked in agonistic embrace. She despairs, he restrains.
Religion saturates this film in terms of allegiance, protocols, capacity to deeply offend by touching heart-beliefs. It does not shirk nor diminish the rending dilemma of two different peoples (not so different at root, but religiously merged with modern nationality in irreconcilable ways) that claim the same land. Some would shrug and say one place is as good another, but not in this place where survival means passionate attachment that drives hard work. (The rez parallel is the idea that if Indians can’t find work, they should just go where the jobs are. But at the moment we are invaded by drilling rigs.)
Gitai is illuminating a true event with his characters. In fact, the only buildings left standing were the greenhouses and the synagogues. But some Jews wished the synagogues demolished to prevent desecration and others burned their own houses to prevent the Palestinians from having them, the same as American frontier homesteaders might try to deprive Indians. The greenhouses were bought by an NGO to protect them for Palestinian use. The granddaughter in the film works in a little plastic-covered hoop greenhouse and her mother tries to help save some plant stock. (She did not try to save anything from her father’s decayed apartment.)
Some of the scenes might seem gratuitous to those unwashed viewers who are taking a beating in these remarks. The settlers practicing for resistance. The soldiers (and their horses) practicing in hopes of a non-damaging removal. And then the actual melée where all the planning and drilling falls apart. There is only chaos, but no blood, no guns, the truncheons stay in the soldier’s backpacks. The violence is emotional. Maybe that’s the worst kind.
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