A lot of us have a friend who seems like – and may well be – the most brilliant person in the world, but he can never quite get it together, personally or professionally. He may come to us looking for a loan, or a shoulder to cry on, and tell us what he would do if only the world would let him.
David Volach’s new film, Daniel Auerbach, which was released in theaters in Israel last week, is about a person like that, only the title character is a guy who did get it together about 17 years ago, made a successful film, and has been trying to make another one ever since.
Which is exactly what Volach himself did.
In 2007, he made a film inspired by his haredi background called My Father My Lord, starring Assi Dayan as an ultra-Orthodox rabbi who takes his family on a summer vacation that turns tragic. The highly poetic movie charmed audiences around the world and won a slew of prizes, among them Best Narrative Feature Award at the Tribeca Film Festival.
Since then, like his alter ego in his new movie, he’s been trying to make another film, and the result is Daniel Auerbach, which he wrote and directed – and in which, to top off the autobiographical feel, he stars. The movie won the Haggiag Award for Best Israeli Feature at the Jerusalem Film Festival last summer.
It’s about several chaotic days in Auerbach’s life, during which he walks around the Tel Aviv apartment he is about to be kicked out of – you get the feeling he has spent most of his adult life in situations like this – talking to himself as he tries to write and making perceptive, quotable observations about everything that ails Israel today.
He also thinks back to his younger self, when he was still a yeshiva student (Yoav Bavly) and later when he was in the process of leaving religious life and when he found love with a young woman but didn’t really know how to make things work with her (the two young people are played by the real-life couple, Lihi Kornowski and Roy Nik).
As Auerbach rambles, he tries to figure out how to make these memories part of his screenplay. He avoids his landlord and the long-suffering movie producer who is still waiting, but no longer so patiently, for him to finish his latest script. To continue that autobiographical vibe even further, the producer is played by Eyal Shiray, one of the producers of Daniel Auerbach and My Father My Lord.
Auerbach also gets into a whirlwind romantic and sexual relationship with a real-estate agent (Gloria Bess, who played Sivan on the television series Asfur), whom he ends up treating callously, which seems to tell another truth about the kind of self-destructive genius Volach plays here.
But while there are moments when you will cringe at Auerbach’s behavior or wish he would do better by his talent, he has undeniable charm and intelligence, and so does much of the movie, even if at moments it can be as frustrating as spending time with that friend who can’t seem to get it together.
Meeting Volach in Jerusalem, the city he left for Tel Aviv years ago, at a preview screening at the Lev Smadar Theater, he was consumed by that common modern anxiety – trying to get used to a new cellphone – and apologized if he seemed distracted at first. “I feel disconnected – it’s maddening,” he said, projecting the self-deprecating charm but not the shagginess of his on-screen incarnation.
Was it rare for him to venture back to Jerusalem, where he grew up as the eighth child in a family of 20 kids in the Makor Baruch neighborhood and later near Bar-Ilan Street? “No, I’m here all the time, there is always a family wedding or some other occasion,” the filmmaker said. While there were years when he was out of touch with his family after he became secular, time has healed much of this breach. “About 30 years ago, when I left, we weren’t in touch for a few years, but we are now.”
It’s not every day you meet someone with 19 siblings, so I asked what his life was like growing up. He spoke with affection of his family. “My mother is the most patient person,” he said, noting that their home was a harmonious one. “I have friends today who have one or two kids and it’s suffocating them. With my mother, things went smoothly.”
Volach’s gift for argument and for asking probing questions is very much on display in the film, and I asked him what it was like for him when he studied at a yeshiva. “I was a good student,” he said: “when things interested me.” The havruta method of yeshiva study, where students work in pairs, read a short passage and argue about it, suited him. “It’s a great way to get to the bottom of things, talking with somebody else. I have ADD and it worked for me.”
But obviously he felt a pull to secular life, devouring secular philosophy and literature and gradually became interested in films, getting glimpses of movies on television sets in stores. “At first, we were just looking to see sexy women – women not wearing too many clothes,” he said.
The spectacles he saw on television intrigued him, and he went on his own to an action movie, which he doesn’t really remember: “I sat in the first row. I thought ‘those were the good seats – why is nobody sitting there?’ So I couldn’t really see anything.”
After that, he learned there would be a screening of the Charlie Chaplin classic Modern Times at the Israel Museum. “I was excited: I thought, Modern Times, it will be really sexy,” and wasn’t at all prepared for a G-rated, black-and-white comedy about industrialization. “It was disappointing.”
Eventually, he did leave and studied cinema with Arik Kaplun, the director who made the movie Yana’s Friends, a comedy-drama about a young Russian woman in Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War. “He was tough with me; he would tell me everything I had done wrong,” he recalled – but, just as with his family, he spoke of his teacher with great affection, more than you might have expected from the self-involved persona he projects on screen.
The spark for his first feature film
His first idea for a feature film was the script that eventually became Daniel Auerbach. “My Father My Lord came later, when I got stuck on the first one.” In spite of the success of these two features, his only other movie credit is a five-minute short film called Donkeys in the Holyland (which can be viewed on YouTube).
Like any other director whose movie is about to be released, he wondered how the screening audience would react and fretted about latecomers, who he felt would miss the point. Just before he went in for the Q&A, I asked him the key question for anyone trying to unravel the David Volach/Daniel Auerbach conundrum: Having seen this autobiographical movie, do I actually know who he is?
“It’s a good question,” he replied. “Yes and no. When I was young, I used to see Woody Allen’s films and I thought I knew who he was... he’s short and he’s funny. Then I grew up and realized that if I ever meet him and I come with all my expectations of the little, funny guy from the movies, that won’t be the guy I meet,” Volach said.
“When you see an actor, you think you know him. It doesn’t matter what you play – if you play Napoleon, you bring your hands, your voice, your eyes. If you cry, you cry the way you cry, not the way Napoleon cries,” he emphasized. “As an actor you tell more than as a creator... But aside from the acting, it’s tricky to say you know me,” the filmmaker said.
You can take a scene and say you hate the hero, but then you change one thing and you think you love him, Volach said. “It’s problematic... My movie is built as autobiography, that’s the intention.” But the movie is very conceptual. “With a conceptual movie, you can’t go running after the reality.”