“And this picture, my picture, the hotel’s picture, maintains this balance, in your opinion?”
“Yes, all in all it is a worthy painting; the compassion and kindness are clear.”
Moses’ head is spinning. He fears the expert will not let him go, leaving him little time for a proper lunch. He takes her hand, warmly expressing his gratitude.
“Thank you, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, you are a marvelous teacher. You have provided a superb summary of the story of Roman Charity in such a short time, and if more questions arise, I can surely find the answer on the Internet here at the hotel.”
“Oh no,” she cries, “please, no, not the Internet. It is full of mistakes and foolishness. Anywhere but the Internet, please. If you need more details, sir, I am at your service. I have plenty of time. And although I am older than you”—she blushes, a mischievous twinkle in her eye—“I can still, like Pero, feed you and your companion additional information.”
FOLLOWING A FAST lunch in the cafeteria, the Spaniard steers his guests to the small screening room. The crowd has shrunk. “See,” remarks Moses with bitterness, “people have grown weary of my immature films and quite rightly prefer a nice winter siesta. What can I say, my friend, I fear I will leave this retrospective deflated.” But Rodrigo dismisses the complaint. The smaller audience stems from scheduling conflicts, not disapproval. He recognizes in the audience a number of wise and sensitive people, and the quality of the attendees makes up for their dearth. He escorts Moses onto the small stage.
But a few “wise and sensitive people” do not compensate for the thinness of the crowd. Besides, the director cannot shake off the suspicion that this retrospective was engineered by Trigano to compel him to defend the writer’s fantasies. Can he even remember the film they are about to show? Did it have a well-defined plot? What he recalls is a static, dreamlike atmosphere; a short, vague, hallucinatory film. A rocky desert crater in winter, filmed at night in freezing cold. He whispers to his young escort, who is ready and waiting to translate: “Believe me, I don’t have much to say.” But Rodrigo, who has not yet seen the film and has heard only a brief description from the archive director, whispers back: “If so, perhaps explain the historical context, say a few words about the function of the army reserves in Israel, for although we are located in a famous barracks, we have not been at war for seventy years.”
Moses complies, folds his arms on his chest, closes his eyes, and retrieves the distant sixties. In a deep, low voice, he describes to the Spanish audience a period that now seems almost like a time of peace: no terror attacks or assassinations, battles or revenge operations. A small democracy in the Middle East, still in its infancy. Jerusalem divided but serene. The army dormant. Peaceful Galilee towns populated by obedient Arabs, and the country’s borders marked by little tin signs.
And as he talks he notices, in one of the half-empty rows, Ruth shaking her head in disagreement. But Moses keeps at it, swept up in his private idyll, insisting on days of peace and stability, a period that has passed and will never return. It is from this point of departure that he asks the small audience to understand his antiquated film, for only a hibernating army can give rise to peace. And as Rodrigo struggles to translate, stumbling over the last sentences, Moses distractedly leaves the stage, motioning to the hidden technician to turn off the lights.
Only as the first images appear does the director realize that the color has vanished from his memory. He was sure this film was shot in black-and-white, and here it is in color. “Did you remember,” he tests the woman by his side, “it was in color?” “Of course,” she answers at once. “I loved this messy movie, I still think it’s one of the decent films you made, even if it went nowhere.”
“Decent?” He is thrown off by the word. “What do you mean, decent?” “In other words, modest,” she whispers, putting a finger to his lips to hush him as the first bit of dialogue is spoken. Moses studies her with affection. The morning sleep did her good: color has returned to her cheeks, and the spark to her eyes. The link he imposed on her memory between Roman Charity by their bed and the film scene she refused in Jaffa seems not to trouble her. On the contrary, it revives her spirit. Will we, he wonders, in the limited time remaining here, find passion as well?
After three dubbed films he is used to the Spanish. Without understanding a word, he at least finds it natural on his actors’ lips. Ten men about forty years old, from cities and towns, factory workers and teachers and clerks, leave their families to go to an army camp and sign for weapons and equipment, because, after assuming they’d been forgotten, they were called up for reserve duty. With practiced hindsight, Moses zeroes in on the film’s weakness. The color erects a barrier between the realistic opening and the fantastical and hallucinatory things to come. Too much detail in the scenes showing the reservists leaving their homes, saying goodbye to wives and children, getting their equipment, telling jokes. A film that seeks to convey intimacy with soldiers who abandon their mission and spend long days in deep sleep must, from the start, go with shades of black, white, and gray alone, the colors of dream.
Sluggishly moving onscreen are older men, heavy and balding, who have not made peace with the reserve duty they have been dealt. Slack-shouldered and befuddled, they shed civilian clothes and put on old uniforms, examine with revulsion the gear and weapons from the past war, and shake years of dust from army blankets, and the director wonders if in these opening scenes, one can already see the seeds of his obsessive attention to detail. He recalls that he intended to ask the actors to improvise freely before the camera, drawing on their experience as reserve soldiers. But Trigano stood firm, fiercely defending his script: Only what is written will be spoken, with nothing added.
Was the quick transition from colorful city scenes to the monotonous yellow desert detrimental to the film? In a very long shot, the small truck carrying the reservists looks like an ant inching into a pothole on a heat-bleached road. It cautiously makes its way down the slope of a small crater to an ancient Nabataean ruin, which the cameraman and set designer came upon when scouting locations. To convert it into a military installation whose nature and purpose no one could guess, they wrapped it in shiny silver sheets, adding a profusion of colorful cables that suggested a giant prehistoric beetle. To ensure the site’s safety and security, the reservists get down from the truck and go to work, unloading cartons of field rations, setting up the water tank towed by the truck in a patch of shade under a desert bush. Since their longtime commander is late to arrive, a replacement is designated at the last moment, a minor bureaucrat in civilian life who spreads a blanket on the ground and goes to sleep.
In light of the film’s failure at the box office and the disappointment among more than a few of the director’s friends, Moses now asks himself why he had not insisted that the screenwriter strengthen the film with a solid plot, beyond the provocative allegory of slumber at a secret military installation. But now that history has debunked the illusion of peace, a group of soldiers who slumber with a clear conscience in front of a vital military installation is a strong image, at least for the director who considers it anew at a screening in a distant land.