If ever a film release could be said to be badly timed, it’s Golda, the bio-pic of former Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, who led her country through the Yom Kippur War of 1973, after a surprise attack from their Arab neighbours, Egypt and Syria. It arrives at a time when another intransigent Israeli Prime Minister is waging war on another Arab enemy, as a result of another surprise attack. Beyond this point, it might be better to emphasise the differences rather than the similarities.
In 1973, Israeli intelligence was caught napping. They could see the military build-up on two separate borders but were poorly prepared for the enemy’s first strike. In the course of this film we learn the reasons for this complacency, which came down to human error, although it was Golda Meir who had to shoulder the responsibility.
While it may seem Benjamin Netanyahu’s government was similarly ill-prepared for the terrorist attack of 7 October, it’s here the comparisons diverge.
The Yom Kippur War, so named because the assault was timed to take advantage of the Jewish holiday, lasted from 6-25 October. It was a short, ferocious conflict fought largely on the battlefield. The current war has dragged on for six months, with Hamas still holding hostages and the Israeli Defence Forces pummelling Gaza into oblivion. It’s the scale of civilian casualties that makes this new war so horrendous. It started with an atrocity and has turned into a bloodbath, led by a Prime Minister who is loathed by a large proportion of his own citizens.
Golda, with Helen Mirren in the lead role, is a sympathetic portrait of a leader under extreme pressure, who rises to the occasion in defiance of her own physical frailty and the demands of her American allies, but it’s not entirely flattering. By 1973 Golda Meir was already 75 years old. She suffered from swollen ankles and was receiving radiation treatment for the lymphoma that would kill her five years later. None of this induced her to stop smoking. She chain-smokes throughout the film, even on the slab where she receives her cancer treatment. If there were an annual award for the film in which most cigarettes get smoked, Golda would win hands down.
To transform the elderly but still beautiful Mirren into homely Golda, required three-and-a-half hours of make-up and prosthetics before every day’s shooting. It’s a big enough feat for Mirren to bring out the humanity in this tough old pollie, but to do it under multiple layers of costume and make-up is a heroic achievement.
If there is a single factor that rescues this dry, plodding film, it’s Mirren’s dedicated performance. The narrative is little more than a blow-by-blow account of each development in the war, as seen from the perspective of the Israeli defence cabinet. It looks bad, then gets worse, then worse again, until the Egyptians make a tactical error, and Israel gets the upper hand. Meanwhile, the Syrians, who began with great success in the Golan Heights, are virtually forgotten. We understand that Israel has launched a counter-offensive, but the details remain sketchy, as we focus on Golda’s private dilemmas.
Aside from Golda, the only other insightful portrayal is Rami Heuberger’s Moshe Dayan, a popular hero whose nerve begins to fail. The chief comander, David ‘Dado’ Elazar, is played in a blunt, pragmatic manner by Lior Ashkenazi, although the real Elazar would be forced to resign after hostilities had concluded.
Director, Guy Nattiv, has managed some artful moments in the way the film is shot, but these are like bright shiny coins embedded in a stodgy pudding. The film never manages to strike a satisfactory balance between the emphasis on Golda’s personality, and the serial discussions in the war room, interspersed with newsreel and radio coverage of the fighting. There’s no doubt that Golda’s finest moment comes in defying Henry Kissinger’s demand for a ceasefire with Egypt, thereby turning stalemate into victory.
There’s one vaguely amusing scene when Golda plays the Jewish mother, making Kissinger eat a plate of borscht, but try as I might, I couldn’t believe in Liev Schreiber in this role. Maybe they should have had another crack with the prosthetics.
It’s an unfortunate irony that Golda’s defiance of the United States is being echoed by Netanyahu’s refusal to consider a ceasefire when there is no conceivable path to a short, sharp victory. One of the recurrent themes in Golda is the pain the heroine feels at the loss of so many young soldiers. Although Nattiv accepts that victory entails sacrifice, he doesn’t forget the human cost of war. He wants us to recognise that Golda Meir had a conscience. There’s little indication that Netanyahu suffers from any such affliction.
Where Golda looks at the stakes of high-powered confrontation in the Middle East, Fremont picks over the collateral damage. Director, Babak Jalali, who was born in Iraq but raised in London, has created a subtle, bittersweet, wryly humorous film that looks at the fate of an Afghan interpreter who has been evacuated to the United States, only to find a completely disjointed life.
Donya is played in deadpan fashion by first-time actor, Anaita Wali Zada, who worked as a journalist in Afghanistan before leaving for America in 2021, when the Taliban came to power. Zada’s attractive, characterful face conveys more than her actual words, which are delivered in halting fashion. Donya is depressed and lonely, she has trouble sleeping. She works in a Chinese fortune cookie factory, and lives in a tiny apartment amid an enclave of Afghan refugees for whom she has mixed feelings.
Fremont is shot in black-and-white, a feature that helps convey the psychological state of a protagonist struggling to understand her own emotions. There’s a strange glamour in black-and-white, as we see in the new Netflix Ripley series, which seems to visit every tourist site in Italy without losing focus on the central character. In Fremont, it also helps us focus on Donya’s interiority, although the sights are less enticing, being confined to humdrum parts of the west coast. To escape the Afghan colony in Fremont Donya has taken a job in San Francisco, the best part of an hour away, but there’s nothing especially exotic about her workplace.
As she sits all day, putting cryptic messages into cookies, Donya receives a constant stream of advice from her dumpy, equally lonely co-worker, Joanna (Hilda Schmelling), who is into blind dates and karaoke. Then there are improving lectures from the boss, Ricky (Eddie Tang), who considers himself a font of Confucian wisdom. “Virtue stands in the middle” is one of his maxims.
When Donya’s not at work she’s visiting the psychiatrist, Dr. Anthony (Gregg Turkington). She only wants sleeping pills, but the doctor insists on reading tearful extracts from Jack London’s White Fang and composing his own fortune cookie messages as a “creative exercise”. His idea of therapy appears to begin at home.
Although everyone is a philosopher in this film, wisdom remains in short supply. In a low moment, Donya writes “Desperate for a dream” on a fortune cookie slip, adding her name and phone number. It arrives in the wrong hands, but fate has another twist in store. By the end, it seems Donya is on the verge of overcoming her loneliness, not through psychiatry or good advice, but by pure chance.
We want Donya to have a fairy tale ending, but her story is probably less important than the overall picture of what it means to be a refugee in another country, far away from friends and family, language and culture. Although she has washed up in a benign place, Donya feels flat all the time, she has little motivation to change her life, or make new friends. It’s a lassitude that infects all the Afghans, from the old chef at the compound who serves her meals every night while watching Afghan soap operas, to a friend called Salim (Siddique Ahmed) who tells her she needs “to fall in love first and worry about the rest later.”
Another Afghan friend, Mina (Taban Ibraz), asks her whether sad mothers bring up sad children. It’s an epidemic of sadness, but on a low level. Everyone knows their native country is no longer an option, but they can’t get used to America. They feel melancholy rather than tragic, ready to joke about their predicament rather than wallow in self-pity. It’s a human comedy, a dead end that can only be escaped with a little luck and an effort of the will. If the luck finds you, it’s up to you to discover the will.
Golda
Directed by Guy Nattiv
Written by Nicholas Martin
Starring: Helen Mirren, Camille Cottin, Ellie Piercy, Lior Ashkenazi, Rami Heuberger, Liev Schreiber, Dvir Benedek, Dominic Mafham, Ed Stoppard, Ohad Knoller
UK/USA, PG, 100 mins
Fremont
Directed by Babak Jalali
Written by Carolina Cavalli & Babak Jalali
Starring: Anaita Wali Zada, Hilda Schmelling, Jeremy Allen White, Gregg Turkington, Siddique Ahmed, Eddie Tang, Divya Jakatdar, Fazil Seddique, Taban Ibraz, Avis See-tho
USA, PG, 91 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 4 May, 2024