“How is the teachers’ Spanish?” Moses whispers to the director of the archive sitting beside him. “Is it correct?” “Not really,” he answers. “Trigano asked that their dubbing be given a foreign accent and the grammar sabotaged a little, and a Polish student who studied here last year showed the dubbers how to do it without making them sound ridiculous.” Indeed, the foreign accent and mistakes provoke no laughter in the municipal auditorium, which was also the case when the film was shown in Israel. From the start, the artful acting of the Khazars creates a mood of uneasiness.
The plan of the pair of teachers, the Holocaust survivors, is becoming clear. They’ve picked out the gifted student and try to convince her, as the film progresses, to give birth to a child they can adopt. After her graduation, they continue to cultivate their loving relationship.
Moses admits that the two played their parts professionally. In effect, they portrayed themselves and even subtly steered him and the cinematographer to bring out the best in them. It was no wonder that they were praised by critics and audiences alike, but after the partnership collapsed, there was no chance of persuading them to work again with Moses. Their loyalty was to Trigano.
In any case, the Spanish sounds alien to the spirit of his film. Some echo or other in the dubbing studio has amplified the artificiality of the speech. He removes his hearing aids, takes out their little batteries, and replaces them in his ears as plugs, to muffle the sound.
The Refusal is a quiet film, centering not on the two teachers but rather on a strong, impressive young woman whose inner journey is complicated but credible. This time Trigano created a worthy character. He gave his girlfriend not only fortitude but moral fiber and sent her to serve in an army base not far from Jerusalem. On weekend leaves, she chooses not to make the long trip to her mother’s home in the south but to stay with her former teachers, who have given her a room of her own in their apartment.
This is a drama of subterranean currents with lengthy close-ups, but still, the story unfolds steadily toward its goal. These two teachers know their student well, and from the time she arrived, in the tenth grade, a gifted girl from a poor town, they spotted her as a means to their own happiness. They are aware of her strong points and vulnerabilities, and cautiously, quietly, over breakfast and dinner, they will try to chart a path to her heart and to incline her toward granting their wish. They tell her about the war, show her pictures of the European world that was destroyed, photos of relatives and children lost. In precise, restrained language, without excessive pathos, they confess their barrenness. And the soldier, now an officer, slowly guesses what her former teachers want from her, pretending she doesn’t while giving them hope.
Step by measured step, the story Trigano devised for his loved one moves ahead, doled out gradually, with no sharp turns, building the tacit agreement, repellent and scandalous but with a mission — to provide a child to those whose world was destroyed, a descendant who will not disappoint them, because they have faith in the Israeli womb that will give it life. This absurdity, in the skillful script, wins the approval of the lonely widow, the mother of the heroine, who accepts that her gifted child, before starting a family of her own, will bring happiness to others.
And so, in this old film, on a makeshift screen in the auditorium of the municipality of a foreign city, a young woman officer still serving in the army becomes pregnant. But now Trigano changes the game. She is not an innocent and confused girl who falls prey to the desire of others but a self-confident, sensual young woman who, to mask the identity of the father, switches lovers promiscuously. The passing of seasons, one of Moses’ directorial specialties, is rendered in the slowly bulging belly of the young woman.
Trigano demanded the right to oversee the proper development of the pregnancy. He did not rely on the costumer or the makeup artist. In the breaks between filming he would lovingly rest his head on the soft pillow taped each morning to Ruth’s belly. But, unlike Trigano, the military authorities are not overjoyed. They advise this valued officer to terminate the pregnancy, but she refuses and so is discharged from service. And instead of accepting the adoptive parents’ invitation to move into their home and enjoy their care until the birth, she rents an apartment on the scruffy southern edge of Tel Aviv and waits there for her delivery date.
At this point, the mighty Israeli landscape enters the picture. Moses is struck by how Toledano’s old camera managed to wrap wind, waves, and sky around the heavily pregnant woman as she walks on the beach. Here begins the turnabout in her mind, a reversal that Moses had to convey with few words and many silences. Slowly the meaning of the mission she has undertaken becomes clear to her: even after the child is handed over to its adoptive parents, she will always, as its mother, be tied to it. And not only to it, but to them. She, too, will have to bear the burden of their memories.
From now on, a new, painful recognition comes into focus, devised by Trigano for the ending of the film in keeping with his personal ideology. In Jerusalem, the two future adoptive parents are preparing for the imminent birth, their anxiety mingled with excitement, retaining an obstetrician and a veteran midwife, splurging on overpriced baby gear to pamper the newborn, while in Tel Aviv, the heroine is in touch with a local agency and is offering her unborn child for immediate, anonymous adoption.
And so, when the hour arrives, with no one by her side and without a word to anyone, she disappears behind the iron door of a semi-legal clinic, a door whose color Toledano requested be changed from green to blue.
Moses feels the suspense among the Spanish audience as the birth, filmed in a studio, draws near. Trigano demanded that this time he not be barred from the set and that he even take part in the directing. But the childbirth scene was cut out in the editing room, where it seemed crude and inconsistent with the spirit of the film. Ruth had screamed and writhed more than she’d been asked to, and the blood did not look realistic. The transfer of the newborn to the social worker was filmed in a real hospital, in the maternity wing. The infant, who was a week old, was loaned to the production by the sister-in-law of the soundman, but only on condition that she play the social worker receiving the child for adoption. And though the woman had never stood before a movie camera, she played her role so naturally that Ruth broke uncontrollably into real tears. Who knows better than Moses about all the fake tears he got out of her in subsequent films. He is amazed how genuine and pained was her weeping in this one, so much so that the screen seems to tremble.
He turns around to find Ruth and sees that Doña Elvira, the experienced actress, also appreciates the dramatic quality of this crying and holds Ruth’s hand as if to congratulate and console her.
From here the film carries on to the end, but not to Trigano’s stormy ending. The pale new mother will not open her coat and undo her blouse in a gesture of generosity and despair. She will not breastfeed the aged actor from the National Theater. She will just keep walking and head to the beach.