Matan Yair’s latest film, A Room of His Own, just opened in theaters throughout Israel on Thursday, and those who admired his previous films, among them Scaffolding, will be happy to hear that his strong gifts for moving storytelling and bringing quirky young characters to life are very much on display in his latest movie.
The movie is a riveting look at a troubled, brilliant, and very endearing teenage boy, Uri (Gilad Lederman, in an amazing movie debut), who has a hugely challenging family situation, to put it mildly. But Yair is able to elevate this family drama into something larger by seamlessly putting Uri’s story into the context of the shadows cast by the Holocaust and Israel’s wars.
Uri’s father (Israel Bright) has PTSD from the first Lebanon War, and he can’t or won’t deal with it. He has left the family, which is a relief on some level, but also difficult for Uri, who really needs a father as he struggles through the challenges of high school and preparing for his army service. Whenever his father is in the apartment, even if it’s just to pick up some of his things, there is a scary vibe, as if a violent outburst is never far away with him.
The situation with his father has pushed Uri close to his mother (Yarden Bar-Kochba), who is trying her best to raise her children in the wreckage her husband left in his wake. She and Uri actually share a tiny room, with their beds right next to each other because she can’t go back into her old bedroom, which was the scene of so much heartbreak for her. The title of the film is a nod to the Virginia Woolf novel and a kind of prescription for what Uri needs, because his mother is so enmeshed with her son and diminished by her own heartbreak that she can’t help him gain independence.
His sister (Neta Roth), a soldier, is sleeping with her boyfriend in the next room whenever she is home from her base, and Uri is obsessed with their relationship, which leads him to act out in various weird ways.
Predictably, things aren’t going that well in school, either. He knows everything there is to know about the Holocaust, but he can’t go on the class trip to the death camps in Poland, because he can’t find his father to get his permission, and, in any case, his mother doesn’t have the money. There is a teacher (Dror Keren) at his school who takes an interest in him, but while this teacher is good at giving him pep talks, he is never able to draw him out and find out what’s really going on at home. Uri dances around the house when he is alone, in between posters of John Lennon and the scary psycho Travis Bickle character from Taxi Driver, not knowing which idol he feels closest to.
Vivid and humane characters
The description of this film might make it sound very bleak, but the characters are so vivid and so humane that you feel for them the way you would for people you actually know, and Yair manages to mix in a healthy dose of black humor. There are so many details that feel true, that it seems that the story must be taken from the writer/director’s own life, which Yair confirmed in a recent interview.
“It’s about this period of time in my life where my mother and I shared a room during the time that my mom and dad were separating,” he said. “I don’t know if it was because I was weak or she was weak, but we joined together. There’s an image in the film with the bed, with its cover, it’s like a raft in the sea, like they’re both clinging together in this safe place while the world is falling apart... You tell yourself that this is wrong, we all know about Freud and Oedipus.”
But because of their strange closeness in their room, the physical side of their relationship is actually muted, he said, and there is only one time when they hug in the film. “The sexual presence in the film is actually his sister,” he said.
A key part of the film is how the personal and national stories are intertwined, and this also has an autobiographical component. “My dad was shell-shocked from the Yom Kippur War. In the film, it’s the first Lebanon War... He was very detached, growing up, I thought all the dads were like that... He couldn’t function.” A contrarian who felt the country had betrayed its soldiers during the war and hated the government, he even hated popular sports teams – and died alone and neglected. “As an adult, you realize he was in a different world.”
The shadow of the Holocaust haunted him and was ever-present in his thoughts, as it is with Uri in the film. Yair remembers walking through the corridor in his high school, decorated with pictures from Pillar of Fire, the Israeli television series about the founding of the state and Jewish history, and there is a similar scene in A Room of His Own.
“You felt like you were living your life but also you were connected to the national story of our history, our country. It shows that this kid is finding a little bit of comfort in these stories of the survivors of the Holocaust, that he’s interested in this period of time, where he can see how people dealt with tough times and difficult times and that they managed and survived, and he’s obsessed with that.”
There is also a scene on Memorial Day, where Uri leans against a wall full of remembrance posters. “He knows he is supposed to go to the army but he’s scared. Being in the army also means becoming a man for him.”
In spite of Uri’s difficult life, it was important for Yair to find the moments of redemption in the story, which seem to parallel the way that the director found redemption in his own life. He has worked as a teacher, which inspired his first film, Scaffolding, a different story about a student from a working-class background, and it is a profession of which he is very proud.
Working with a cast he calls “amazing,” Yair said that, especially in some of the most tense scenes, “We felt this joy in the creativity together.” Directing Gilad Lederman and Yarden Bar-Kochba as mother and son was “kind of like seeing my mother and myself.” Israel Bright, who plays his father, “reminded me of him physically.”
Yair has published several novels, is now working on a new one, as well as a television series, and has returned to teaching high school since October 7. Talking to him, you sense that A Room of His Own has brought him some closure and has helped him find his own room, so to speak. He’s not looking back in anger, but trying to figure out how what happened made him into who he is today.
He told a touching story of how his mother went to visit his father when he was near death. “She went to the hospital and thanked him for the three kids they had... After all these years, she kept on loving him.” And somehow, Yair kept loving them both of as well, as his touching film reveals.