It's a wonderful life

Director Avi Nesher talks about filming ‘The Wonders.’

By HANNAH BROWN
The Wonders (photo credit: Courtesy)
The Wonders
(photo credit: Courtesy)
You can see the Mediterranean from Avi Nesher’s office, but all the director wants to talk about is Jerusalem, and how his latest film, The Wonders, which opened this week throughout Israel, was inspired by and is a reflection of that city.
“It’s Lewis Carroll meets Carol Reed,” he says of the film, which is heavily influenced by both Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Reed’s classic film noir, The Third Man, as well as other noir films.
These artists may not be names that most people would think of in connection with Jerusalem, but for Nesher they are key to understanding The Wonders and his passionate and relatively recent affinity for Israel’s capital.
“Jerusalem is an extraordinary city, it really is amazing. As a secular Israeli, the way I thought of Jerusalem growing up, you go there on a school trip, it’s a sad place you don’t really want to go to. You don’t really think of it in its full majesty,” he says.
The film is a mixture of genres and moods, which combines animation and live action to reveal the city Nesher discovered when he finally delved into it. Co-written with Shaanan Streett, the lead vocalist for the funk/hip hop band Hadag Nahash, it tells the story of Ariel Navon (Ori Hizkiah), nicknamed Arnav (Hebrew for rabbit), a gentle slacker graffiti artist/bartender trying to win back his ex-girlfriend (Efrat Gosh), who has recently become Orthodox. One day he glimpses a rabbi (Yehuda Levi) being led into an apartment across from his building and begins to suspect that the rabbi is being held against his will. This leads Arnav into a film-noir world, complete with a tough detective (Adir Miller); a beautiful mystery woman (Yuval Scharf); a bunch of scary, tough guys (the men holding the rabbi); and the rabbi himself, who is the leader of a cult of followers who believe he can see into the future.
The story, which combines humor with the mystery, unfolds to a score by Hadag Nahash, and features moments when Arnav’s many drawings come to life and illuminate the action.
“Israel is so torn between the secular and the religious, and you are part of the secular, so in many ways, it’s enemy territory. And you don’t realize...
how extraordinary Jerusalem is, because it represents values you find troublesome. But it’s a misrepresentation, it can represent many things. It doesn’t need to represent ultra-Orthodox throwing rocks at cars on Shabbat, it’s just the way secular Israelis have been brought up, to think of it as a place where people who don’t go to the army throw stones at people who do go to the army... You think of it as a place where they abuse women and make them sit at the back of the bus. In many ways, you think of Jerusalem as Montgomery, Alabama, in the ’60s, and it’s wrong to think of it this way.
“But that’s how secular Israelis think of it. That’s one of the things I really enjoy about The Wonders, that people go see it, a guy from a television station just saw it, and he said, ‘This really makes you want to move to Jerusalem.’ “Because it is a wonder. It’s also dark, it’s also menacing, it’s also many things, but it is a wonder. It’s much more of a wonder than Tel Aviv, with all due respect to nightclubs and beaches. But Jerusalem, there’s nothing like it in the world.”
It’s impossible to say that the film is a departure from Nesher’s usual style, because Nesher isn’t a director who repeats himself. His career has spanned the early golden age of Israeli movies in the 1970s, all the way to the renaissance that has taken place in the last decade. After his army service in the IDF’s General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, he burst onto the movie scene in 1978 with The Troupe, a movie about the lives and loves of an army entertainment troupe, and one of the most popular and beloved movies in the history of Israeli cinema. He followed that up the next year with Dizengoff 99, a comedy about a girl and two guys sharing an apartment in Tel Aviv and working in advertising, which was quite risqué for its time and involved young people who weren’t Zionist heroes, but just kids – which had not been seen before. After a few more films, Hollywood came calling, and Nesher, who was in his mid-20s, took off.
Although he made a good living in the US making genre films – one of the ones he’s proudest of is The Taxman, about an IRS agent played by Joe Pantoliano (Ralph Cifaretto on The Sopranos) who cracks a case involving the Russian Mafia in Brighton Beach – eventually the thrill wore off. While he was making Ritual, a remake of I Walked with a Zombie starring Jennifer Grey in Jamaica, he found he missed Israel. Seeing Jerusalem Cinematheque founder Lia van Leer on a visit home, he was surprised and then pleased when the “queen of Israeli cinema” virtually ordered him to come back. By then he was ready, even eager to begin making Israeli movies again.
“To make movies that are meaningful to an audience, there’s no feeling like it,” he says. “In America, you can make a movie that’s very successful and it’s a drop in the ocean. The audiences here are wonderful. Israel has one of the most educated and sophisticated audiences in the history of cinema. They read Amos Oz and David Grossman, they go see movies by [Spanish director Pedro] Almodovar and [Serbian filmmaker Emir] Kusturica. They really allow you to be adventurous. Look at the Israeli movies that have been big hits here in the last couple of years, Footnote [about Talmud scholars] and Fill the Void [a drama about haredim in Tel Aviv].”
THE MOVIES he has made since coming back to Israel a little over a decade ago are “not mainstream movies. But somehow they found really large audiences.”
His 2004 movie, Turn Left at the End of the World, told the story of a teenage girl from India who immigrates to Israel and befriends a Moroccan girl in a Negev town in the ’60s.
The Secrets, which came out in 2007, was about two haredi girls in a Safed seminary who delve into Kabbala and try to save the soul of their tormented neighbor, played by French actress Fanny Ardant. His 2010 film, The Matchmaker, was a coming-ofage story about a boy growing up in Haifa, who gets a job as a kind of spy for a matchmaker (played by Miller, who is featured in The Wonders), a Holocaust survivor who knew the boy’s father in Europe. The matchmaker’s office is in a movie theater that only shows love stories and is run by seven dwarfs, siblings who survived Auschwitz and came to Israel.
Those dwarfs, who were played by actors but were closely based on a real family Nesher learned about while researching the film, “were the DNA of my movie,” says Nesher.
After completing The Matchmaker, he became intrigued with the idea of making a film set in Jerusalem, especially since he started teaching screenwriting in the Sam Spiegel Film and Television School in the city, but he had to discover the DNA for this new project.
“I would come to Jerusalem in the morning [before his class], go to the shuk [Mahaneh Yehuda] and walk around,” he recalls.
“I became more and more fascinated by Jerusalem,” he says. “I had thought of it as a sleepy little town, but it’s the center of the world, with 3,000 years of fighting among Jews, Christians and Muslims over who will control this real estate. It’s the eye of the storm.”
One day, when wandering around Nahlaot, Nesher saw a small house with a blue door that had a picture of a rabbit on it. “And I started imagining an artist who lived in this apartment.
With me, it always starts with a visual idea. And then I started looking for a story. The next thing I think of is the music, and often the music is the tone of the movie and the emotion of the movie. Before I write I start listening to all kinds of music. And I went to a Hadag Nahash concert.”
He loved what he heard. “They combine funk and hip hop and they are very, very aggressively political and yet completely communicative. They create big hits, but they have a lot to say.
Which is kind of like the cinema I believe in, cinema that really reaches many people and makes a difference, and yet is subversive in its nature.”
He got together with lead vocalist Streett, and they immediately hit it off.
“He’s a die-hard Jerusalemite... He showed me around. At some point, I said, ‘Do you want to write this with me?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know how to write a screenplay.’ I said, ‘It’s okay, I know how to write it and you know much more about Jerusalem than I do.’” Nesher likes to collaborate with people with different backgrounds from his. “I thought of it as an experiment.
A great director is about being the guy who can identify a great idea even though it’s not his. It’s not about you being the leader of the band. It’s about joining in, exploring, going on a journey.
It was like a jam session, an experiment in art.”
They began exploring the idea of a character who is a Jerusalem street artist – “There’s a lot of Shaanan in Arnav, he was a barman” – whose story would connect the thriving contemporary art scene in Jerusalem to the religious fabric of life in the city.
“There’s a natural affinity between people who believe in God and people who believe in art,” says Nesher. “In Hebrew, the words for belief (emuna) and art (omanut) are so similar. The story is about the meeting between a prophet and an artist... It took on a life of its own.”
“Meeting Arnav, who is pure at heart, changes the other characters who are dark, who have secrets, as they do in noir movies,” says Nesher. “It’s noir with no gunshots and no dead bodies.”
As part of the religious subtext, there are references to Amos the prophet, “the most socially conscious of all prophets... he was for the poor and against the rich. He is the prophet of choice for many of these seers, they are not necessarily rabbis, but modern-day prophets. I met many of these people when I was researching the film.
Whether you believe or not, you get the feeling that somebody of substance is sitting across from you. And then they tell you they have a pipeline into the future.”
The animation was part of the experiment for Nesher, to bring to life the abstract, mystical side of the city. He had never made an animated film before, although he is a very visual filmmaker and is married to an artist, Iris Nesher, with whom he has two children. He got together a group of artists, none of whom had ever made a movie before, and they created what he calls, “Arna-vision,” Arnav’s drawings and their animated versions.
THE FILM is notable for its eclectic ensemble cast, who helped crystallize the characters. It stars Miller, a standup comic and television writer whom Nesher turns into a kind of Israeli Humphrey Bogart here. He plays Gittes, the detective hired by the rabbi’s sister-in-law to bring him home.
While the detective’s name is a clear reference to the Jack Nicholson character in Chinatown, a man disillusioned by the corruption around him but still striving for purity, Miller makes the brooding Israeli Gittes his own.
“Adir is a great writer and a great actor,” says Nesher. Miller had a small part in The Secrets, and then played the title character in The Matchmaker, for which he won the Ophir Best Actor Award in 2010. “He made the greatest sacrifice to be in this movie. He delayed writing the new season of Ramzor [his hit television series, which was purchased by the Fox network and remade into a US show]. It was an artistic decision.
He felt he couldn’t write and play Gittes at the same time.”
Casting his everyman hero, Arnav, proved more challenging. “I knew we had to find someone who is a little bit of an Arnav at heart,” Nesher explained. “We saw everybody. Then my daughter told me about this guy who was chosen as the most popular young comedian. I saw him performing and he was really funny. He was very much like the character. He was one of the founding fathers of Arnav.”
But perhaps the biggest surprise of the film is a virtually unrecognizable Levi playing a rabbi who has a cult of followers. Levi is well known to both Israeli moviegoers and television audiences from his appearances in such films as Eytan Fox’s Yossi & Jagger and various TV shows. “In a way it seems like casting against type,” Nesher says of his decision to use the actor, who is often photographed out and about in Tel Aviv with his girlfriend, singeractress Ninet Tayeb. “He has a huge following.
But rabbis are like movie stars to their followers. I had to use somebody who is very charismatic. Somebody who you will believe can get people to worship him. He got so into the part, he wanted to sleep in that dingy apartment where we shot. We spoke to many rabbis, he studied Gemara and Kabbala. He was totally into it, it was so beautiful to watch. He has that quality that you don’t really know where you stand with him, just like [the character] Knafo.”
All the actors brought something of themselves to the part. “Yuval [Scharf] is so delicate, but you see she has the strength to move mountains, if that’s what’s required.” Singer Gosh, who plays the newly Orthodox waitress who is the hero’s ex-girlfriend, “has had her own trials and tribulations in finding love. They all bonded with their characters and it became real.”
While Nesher is busy right now promoting The Wonders, he is also thinking ahead to his next movie. “During the filming of The Wonders, I would come back to the hotel and write notes about movies to come, all Jerusalem stories. I’m very interested in another story that takes place in Jerusalem.”


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