The director of the archive again introduces his guests, this time briefly, and the Israeli director insists on saying a few preliminary words. Again he cannot resist carping about their choosing such a crude early film from his many decades of work. Yes, he remembers the lighthearted spirit of the original film, but he wonders if it will hold up after all these years, especially when dubbed in Spanish.
Juan de Viola orders the lights turned off. When the credits appear on the screen, Moses notices that the lead actor is listed as codirector with him. Had Moses merely agreed to this, or was it done on his initiative? Despite the jovial feel of the production and the film’s moderate popularity among the young people, Moses himself had his doubts, so it could be that attaching the actor’s name as codirector was meant to relieve Moses of full responsibility. But what was it that bothered him about Obsession? The Spanish title now seems more fitting than the Hebrew one.
He was essentially forced to direct this picture. Trigano didn’t involve him in the writing process; he just handed him a finished script, written in collaboration with the editor of the student newspaper at Hebrew University — a handsome, talented young man Trigano had met in an introductory psychology course required for students in the humanities program. This young man came up with an idea for a film about the crazy power of Freudian symbolism. Trigano would write the screenplay, and the friend would secure funding, but on condition that he play the lead.
After the two managed to get financial support from the association of clinical psychologists, as well as a personal contribution from the teacher of the course, a woman of independent means, Moses had a choice: let the new partners run with an idea that he found peculiar and childish, or swallow his misgivings and preside as director over a fairly credible rendering of a preposterous notion. Fearing that if he refused, Trigano might drop him in favor of a young and gifted partner, Moses chose the latter alternative.
With perfect timing, a sudden burst of rain drums upon the roof of the small auditorium as the camera starts to wander through Jerusalem on a wintry night, this time focusing on the alleyways of a poor neighborhood, largely ultra-Orthodox yet tolerant of the secular young people living there. In a rented apartment, whose location Moses can’t quite recall, a raucous student party is under way, dominated by a tall young man with long hair who transfixes his listeners with tales of his travels in India. He takes from his pocket a large fountain pen that doubles as a flashlight, and from the innards of the pen he produces a tiny scroll of parchment with a colorful picture of a beautiful, naked Indian woman, wreathed by inscriptions, devout or perhaps lustful, in an unknown tongue. The pen is passed from hand to hand, and the students examine it with amused curiosity, opening and closing it, testing the little flashlight, examining the scroll to have a good look at the Indian woman and try to guess the meaning of the writing around her.
Moses cannot remember what was said or wasn’t in this party scene, but he is disinclined to listen to Pilar’s simultaneous translation. She sits at his side in place of de Viola, who has gone to prepare for evening Mass. Yes, now he understands the priest’s offhand remark: not knowing the language sometimes brings about new insights.
With no dialogue to distract him, he can see clearly not only the fakery of the main character who tries to pump up his manliness with a pen from the East, but the hollowness of the actor himself.
Is this what bothered him while they were making the film, so much so that he tried to disown it, despite its relative success? Could he actually sense that the charismatic young man who won Trigano over was morally damaged?
It wasn’t the man’s opinions or his smooth way with words that put Moses off. He was convinced that a man who believed in nothing could not, for all his cleverness and charm, penetrate the character of another human being and make it come alive. Moses refused to include the man again—“It’s him or me,” he told Trigano.
On the screen, the hour is late and the party is over, and on his motor scooter, the hero is giving a student, played by Ruth, a ride to her parents’ home in Jerusalem. At the door, he takes his leave with quick hugs and a cursory kiss, then continues on to his rented room in a house not far from the Old City, which in those pre-’67 days was off-limits, an object of longing. A bit tipsy, he undresses for bed, listening to an upbeat tune on a foreign radio station, and in his cozy pajamas, before going to sleep, he decides he wants to fondle the Indian pen one more time, take out the piece of parchment, perhaps decipher the message on the lips of the girl. But he discovers the pen has disappeared, and he searches for it frantically, but in vain. And instead of waiting till morning, he gives way to the panic that drives the plot and plunges him into the abyss.
Step by step, Trigano cleverly escalated the insane obsession. After the hero turns his room upside down, he gets dressed, grabs a flashlight, and returns to the cold empty streets he crisscrossed with the student. He walks slowly, inspecting the road and the sidewalks, ultimately arriving at the girl’s house, where he pounds on the door, wakes her parents, and insists that their daughter has pickpocketed his pen.
The search grows more delirious, and since the film’s hero, unlike the audience, doesn’t understand what the lost pen symbolizes, his madness becomes a tragicomic journey, offering glimpses of Israeli student life as each of his friends reacts to his behavior, some with anger and scorn, a few with compassion and readiness to help. Somehow this shoestring-budget film, eighty-five minutes long, evolved into a picaresque quest for the lost symbol, and Moses notices that despite the loony script, he made sure as director to maintain respect for the tormented character wallowing in humiliation, so as not to distance the audience from a man bent on surrender to obsession. But Trigano’s script failed to bring the film to the open and generous conclusion found in the greatest picaresque works. After the hero goes from student to student, trying vainly to discover who at that raucous party had secretly coveted his pen, he breaks into their apartments to search for his lost object. And since the inscrutable symbol has so deeply permeated the soul of the hero that the psychiatrist, who enters late in the film, cannot free him of the obsession, it’s only natural that the rigid, one-dimensional screenplay was given a radical ending that Trigano was unwilling to modify. And so, in the last scene, as the sun goes down, the hero lays his handsome head on a railroad track and waits.
The cheers at the end of the movie are more ardent and longer than at the previous screening, perhaps because of the young people in the crowd, while some of the older ones hurry to the exit before the lights go up. Ruth opens her bloodshot eyes and yawns. Moses wonders if there is any point to going onstage without the archive director at his side. The petite animation teacher who is to moderate will not be forceful enough to control the audience in discussing a film that contains a seed of perversion. He suggests combining this discussion with the one that is to follow the evening screening, especially since the railroad tracks that end the present film will open the next one.
Pilar appears relieved. She too is happy to avoid discussing a movie whose meaning is so obvious, and she hurries to the stage and announces the postponement of the discussion until the next screening. A few in the audience look disappointed; this time, many have wanted not only to ask questions but to attack. And Moses, who feels mildly guilty about avoiding the conversation, asks to attend the evening Mass conducted by the priest. For at the end of the retrospective, if he indeed decides to confess his professional sins to a film-savvy priest, he ought to know something about the confessor’s style of prayer.