Dodging Difficulties

"The Human Resources Manager" conveys the impact that years of living in the shadow of suicide bombings had on ordinary Israelis.

By BERNARD DICHEK
film (photo credit: courtesy vlad plaiasu)
film
(photo credit: courtesy vlad plaiasu)
SOMEWHERE IN AN ISOLATED part of post-Soviet Romania, two Israelis are seated in a dining hall in a nuclear-bombproof shelter deep underground.
One of them, a reporter, turns to the other, and goes on a tirade about how the bunker symbolizes everything that is wrong with society. He lashes out at the folly of trying to run away from the problems of the world, and compares building downward into the depths of the earth with the futile attempt in biblical times to build a tower to heaven.
The scene is a somewhat stretched out, philosophical moment in an otherwise fastpaced, lightly-dialogued film, but it both encapsulates what “The Human Resources Manager” is all about and exemplifies the skilled screenwriting that has turned renowned author A.B. Yehoshua’s novel “A Woman in Jerusalem” into a riveting screen adaptation that won five Ophir awards and is Israel’s 2011 US Academy Award (Oscar) entry for the best foreign language film.
The person running away from problems is the other Israeli in the bomb shelter, the film’s unnamed protagonist, the human resources manager of an industrial-size Jerusalem bakery. Played by Israeli-American actor Mark Ivanir (“Schindler’s List,” “The Good Shepherd”), the HR manager is a detached, aloof, divorced man in his forties, who lived on his own outside Israel for many years. He is criticized by his exwife for not spending enough time with their daughter and chastised by his boss for not being in touch with the company’s employees.
The HR manager has come to Romania to accompany to her hometown the body of a foreign worker employed by the bakery, who was killed in a Jerusalem suicide bombing. The body of the woman lay unidentified at the city morgue for several days until a damning exposé, written by the reporter in the bomb shelter, appeared in a Jerusalem newspaper. The exposé castigated the bakery for neglecting its responsibilities to its workers and for the unfeeling way it treated them.
To tidy up the company’s image and avoid further bad press, the CEO (Gila Almagor) sends the HR manager on a public relations mission: to provide a proper burial for the exemployee back in her native Romania. The journey that the HR manager undertakes while searching for the foreign worker’s family and the transformation that he undergoes along the way lends the film its dramatic structure.
“The Human Resources Manager,” directed by Eran Riklis (“The Syrian Bride,” “The Lemon Tree”), is a disquieting, mesmerizing contemplation that manages to convey in an unspoken way the impact that years of living in the shadow of threats like suicide bombings had on ordinary Israelis. The film sustains a reflective, gray mood as the action unravels through rainy, dark Jerusalem nights and dreary, freezing-cold Romanian landscapes. Paradoxically, and in keeping with the Kafkaesque tone of the film, one of the few characters in the film to be given a name, Yulia, is the previously anonymous foreign worker killed in the bombing.
Much of the strength of the film is in what is not said and what is not seen. The suicide bombing is not shown, and in scenes of the HR manager and his young daughter immediately after the bombing, neither father nor daughter mentions the subject. But the suppressed fear in the child and the frozen emotions in the father are deftly conveyed in the voice and actions of the actors. The film is also convincing in its portrayal of the baffled predicament of an Israeli wandering around an icon-filled Romanian church.
The $2 million multinational co-production received funding from Israeli, French and German sources and was filmed at a range of locations in both Jerusalem and Romania. The film has some drawn-out scenes and its 103- minute running time could have used some paring down but it contains many stunning images like the panoramic shot of a Soviet-era tank moving across the bleak Romanian terrain with a coffin on top that etch themselves into the viewer’s memory.
WHILE THE FILM CLOSELY follows the plot line of Yehoshua’s book, carefully calculated changes were made, says Noah Stollman, the film’s scriptwriter, in an interview with The Report at a Tel Aviv café. “The best homage to an author can actually be to create a screenplay that can be viewed as an original work,” he says.
Stollman met with Yehoshua several times during the writing process and received “generous input” from him but the screenwriter was free to go his own cinematic way. For example, the reporter’s philosophical discourse in the bunker was devised by the scriptwriter. Stollman points out that in the book the reporter was a philosophy student who saw himself as a voice of the downtrodden and who engaged in philosophical dialogues with the HR manager. “In the film, the reporter is more of a cynic, a pain-in-the-ass [character] who offers comic relief,” says Stollman, who won an Ophir Prize for his adaptation of the film.
The deployment of humorous and offbeat supporting characters, like that of the reporter, is indeed one of the key storytelling achievements of the film. Almost all of the minor characters are memorable and funny, from the creepy attendant working at the Jerusalem morgue to the bossy woman serving as the Israeli consul in Romania.
Stollman is highly critical of the failure of many local film productions to have a separate screenwriter and director. For example, David Grossman’s novel, “Intimate Grammar,” also released this year, was adapted to the screen by Nir Bergman, who also served as the film’s director. Some critics have contended that Bergman tries too hard to follow the narrative structure of the book.
“I’m on a bit of a crusade to get the status of screenwriters elevated here,” says Stollman, noting that having directors double as scriptwriters is one of the major differences between Israeli and American filmmaking.
Indeed, Stollman, 44, knows well the differences both of living and making films in the two countries. Born in the United States, he grew up in Jerusalem after his family moved to Israel when he was three years old. He studied filmmaking at the Sam Spiegel Film & Television School in Jerusalem, but after graduating, moved to New York where he worked in the film industry. While living in the US, he continued to work on Israeli productions, among them, “Someone To Run With” (2006), an adaptation of the David Grossman novel, and “Adam Resurrected” (2008), an adaptation of the Yoram Kaniuk novel. The father of two young boys, he moved back to Israel with his Israeli-born wife two years ago.
Sporting a T-shirt with the initials of the Brooklyn Queens Expressway on it, Stollman sits back in a Tel Aviv cafébookstore on a Friday morning and, noting the anxieties that come with daily life in Israel, mulls over where his future lies. He emphasizes that to move back to America would not be an attempt to run away from problems so much as a chance to enjoy the creative opportunities that large-budget American productions offer.
Asked to compare Israeli society today with the traumatic, terror-plagued period in the ’90s in which the film is set, Stollman observes: “If anything, we have regressed. One government after another has instilled in us a fear of ‘plagues and abominations,’ whether it is foreign workers or Palestinians or something else, making us blame the enemy for everything.” However, sectors of society do find their humanity. For example, adds Stollman, in the movie, the warmth and compassion that the HR manager shows at the end of the film provides an optimistic note. “It’s possible to get past that fear of the other, but the human resources manager needed to be taken to death’s door [getting seriously ill from eating tainted soup in the bunker] before that happened.
“Getting past that fear can be done. It just takes a strong act of courage, a strong act of humanity to do so,” he concludes.