When Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid’s proxy, the veteran director Y (Avshalom Pollak), lands in the Aravah desert for a celebration of his career at a remote public library, he’s flush with the anxieties of a censorship battle over a planned biopic on the Palestinian activist Ahed Tamimi, but everything appears under control. It can’t stay that way. The sparseness of these hinterlands registers sonically in the staccato crunch of Y’s shoe soles on tarmac and sand, while Lapid’s trademark close-up work, in the chippy guerilla style of his 2019 Synonyms, makes the whole outdoors claustrophobic. It doesn’t take long for tensions in Y’s position, alongside the reckoning with Israeli state violence that undergirds his whole career, to chain-react.
The sparse crackle of the desert acts like kindling for the movie’s explosive reckonings; Y’s life, as he narrates it to his young librarian liaison Yahalom (Nur Fibak), charts a mounting howl of reckoning over decades of unwashed blood, culminating in a several-minute screed of monologue that is Lapid’s harshest statement yet on the contradictions within his art and the history of his nation. The chagrin of having to go through with Y’s quaint library event once all that fire and fury have hit the screen gives the tail end of the film a delightful bathos. If anything, the story might have gone on longer, as the Tamimi project never entirely takes shape and the powerful forces let loose in Y’s desert epiphany fizzle out by the end credits. But maybe that is simply the desert swallowing all human projects whole. 109 min.
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