Nutuk, a new drama series running on Channel 12 (and available on https://www.mako.co.il/tv), combines a story about a Druze child who believes he is the reincarnation of a man who disappeared under mysterious circumstances with a plot about criminal activity along the northern border. The real subject, though, is the tension surrounding how Israeli Druze forge their own identity, with some opting for a life in the secular Israeli mainstream, while others cling to a more traditional way of life. The combination of the two storylines works well and gives us a fascinating glimpse into a community that most outsiders know very little about.
The title is a word that the Druze, who believe that everyone in their religion is reincarnated, use to describe the feeling people get when they sense they are connecting with their previous incarnations. Nutuk focuses on an attractive young couple, Rami (Amjad Bader), a tech guy who is having trouble finding a job, and Maya (Lucy Ayoub), an ambitious doctor, and their son, Daniel (Jude Khatib). We learn early on that they are facing tension in their marriage, partly because Rami hasn’t been able to find a good job after leaving the military, where he was in the shadow of his father (Norman Issa), a high-ranking general, and his brother, an officer who was killed in the line of duty. Their other problem is that Maya hasn’t gotten pregnant with a second child yet, something that everyone in their lives feels entitled to ask about.
They are on the way to a family get-together at a hotel when they stop at a gas station, where Daniel begins to behave in a bizarre way, telling a stranger he is his deceased brother and yelling that Maya is not his mother.
Maya insists on taking Daniel to a psychiatrist in the hospital where she works. Meanwhile, Daniel opens up to Maya’s father, a traditional Druze farmer, about what he remembers about his past life. This revelation is a problem for both parents, who don’t believe in reincarnation, or at least, not literally.
Meanwhile, Suli (Nahd Basheir), the stranger from the gas station, turns out to have reluctantly gotten involved with a group of smugglers who are taking the highly potent amphetamine Captagon into Israel across one of the northern borders. These smugglers are on the radar of a dogged Modern Orthodox Shin Bet agent (Oz Zehavi), which is all I can say without revealing spoilers. While some people may be put off by the supernatural aspect of the series, it is played down, or at least it is in the first episodes that were released to the press.
Depicting Druze in Israeli cinema
There have been just a handful of movies depicting Druze in the past, notably Eran Riklis’s The Syrian Bride and Adi Adwan’s Arabani. Nutuk was created by Nahd Basheir, who is Druze, and Roy Iddan, directed by Adam Sanderson, and produced by Yoav Gross. Lucy Ayoub, who was in Fauda and 8200, gets to shine here, and if someone writes a part for her in a rom-com, she could become the Israeli Audrey Hepburn.
The series was filmed during the war in Daliat al-Carmel and Majdal Shams, and Ayoub said in an interview on Niv Raskin’s morning show on Channel 12 that they were interrupted frequently by missile alerts. The series is dedicated to the memory of the 12 Druze children killed in Majdal Shams in a Hezbollah rocket attack in July 2024.
Tu Bishvat or Tisha B'Av? Netflix interfaith series makes a mistake
While much of the interfaith romance series, Nobody Wants This on Netflix, has been hailed as an authentic depiction of American Judaism, it turns out there was a major mistake in one of the episodes. When the hero, Noah (Adam Brody), is talking to another rabbi, played by Seth Rogen, Rabbi Neil, this rabbi speaks enthusiastically about how wonderful Noah’s work is, and how influenced he was by the sermon Noah gave on Tu Bishvat. “It blew my mind. It changed the way I mourn. I was mourning all wrong,” says Rabbi Neil. Clearly, the screenwriter, director, script editors, etc. mixed up Tu Bishvat, the New Year for trees, a celebration of agriculture, which takes place in the winter, and Tisha B’Av, a day of mourning for the destruction of the Temple, which takes place in the summer.
When I was growing up in the US, I had never heard of either holiday, and that’s not uncommon for American Jews, but rabbis would know better. You’d think, though, that the series would have either a rabbi or some other consultant on religious issues review each screenplay. Still, it’s a rare misstep for a show that gets much right.
While you're waiting for Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere to be released on Disney+, you can watch the 2024 documentary about the Boss, Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, on the same streaming service. It features behind-the-scenes footage of Springsteen’s recent world tour. If you want to go deeper into the Bruce mode, you can see Springsteen on Broadway on Netflix, a film of his 2018 show, in which he sings and discusses how his life has affected his music.
Kathryn Bigelow directed two major movies about war and the toll it takes on those caught up in it, The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty, so when I saw that she had directed a new Netflix movie, A House of Dynamite, I was excited to watch it. It seemed that the movie, which is about the chaos that ensues when a single missile with a nuclear warhead is launched at the US from parts unknown, would be interesting for Israelis to see, given that missiles were fired at Israel thousands of times by Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Iranians for two years. Many have joked that Israel is the only place in the world where, when you get a missile alert, you can pass the time in the bomb shelter trying to figure out who has fired this time. I couldn’t help wondering how even fictional Americans would cope with a similar, but more dire, scenario.
Not well at all, as it turns out. The movie, which is based around a frustrating gimmick (more on that in a minute), paints a picture of a country ill-prepared for such an attack. Many experts have weighed in since the movie was released, and most have said the situation depicted is all too plausible.
The bulk of A House of Dynamite takes place during the 19 minutes between the time the nuclear missile is detected and when it is predicted to land on Chicago and the surrounding towns. That’s a good idea for a tension-filled but quick story. To stretch it to feature-film length, though, the movie tells the same story three times in different locations and from different perspectives, some of which overlap, with much of the same dialogue.
Section one takes place in an interceptor station in Alaska and the White House Situation Room. The next part is set mainly in an underground Strategic Command Center in Nebraska. Tracy Letts is the standout here, as a general who manages to make a few wry quips during the disaster.
The third part features the telegenic US president, played by Idris Elba (who was Stringer Bell on The Wire), as he is whisked from an event to a helicopter with the Marine carrying the suitcase with launch codes and a packet outlining different response scenarios. The president seems not to know much about his options, so he quotes podcasts and asks the Marine for advice. Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris) seems equally clueless. All the characters with relatives in Chicago make maudlin farewell calls.
Of course, there is an interception system, but it turns out that it has only a little over a 50% success rate, about which the general in Nebraska comments, “So it’s a f***ing coin toss? This is what we get for $50 billion?” Not reassuring.
Oddly, most critics have hailed this as an important movie that makes an anti-nuke statement, although frankly, it could just as easily be seen to show the importance of investing even more money in missile-defense systems.
In the end, it plays like a Dr. Strangelove without jokes or Fail Safe, the serious nuclear war movie from 1964, without that film’s gravity and suspense. Both of those movies are available on Apple TV.