Ray Pride

"So how come you didn't ask about politics?"

This comes at the end of breakfast with 34-year-old writer-director Nir Bergman, whose tender, sorrowful "Broken Wings" opens Friday. Politics seems like an obvious question to ask an Israeli filmmaker, I say.

His debut feature is political for its omissions, dealing with how a family reconstitutes itself after a sudden, senseless death without pretending to be part of the daily strife and struggle of the Middle East. To not talk about politics is an obvious political choice. "It's true," he says. "I have nothing to say to Israelis about politics. Because they know it all. Each one of us has at least two different ways of thinking about the situation."

The family tragedy in his observant drama is one of the more astute recent movies about grief and survival, a concern implicit in any film coming from that part of the world. Bergman is also good at showing the drab city streets they occupy, the cluttered apartments. My admiration for his curiosity about the lives of others was reinforced when he asked if we could meet in my neighborhood, and afterwards, I showed him the view of several cathedrals from my windows.

Over coffee, he was as serious and searching as his often-delicate movie. "We have no Zen in our lives, y'know? So how do we give our kids some Zen experience, a perspective about life [that's not about competition]. I was a bit like [the young girl who wears the titular wings] in the film. I mean, 'Broken Wings' is quite personal. It was something I went through when I was about 10 years old until I was a teenager. I couldn't really understand what it is that grownups do in this life! I had Carlos Castaneda or Ouspensky, they were like my options for escape, giving me another perspective. They don't work the same as when I was a teenager, but..."

He'd shot documentaries, but it took a long time to get his first fiction feature financed. "I guess it's hard to make films anywhere, budget-wise. I wasn't expecting anything easier. I went into stress whether the film would be made or not, and I feared it. I don't think it was hard. It was just normal. It's the way I was educated, it's hard for films to be made."

But he took the time to work with his lead actress, Orli Zilbershatz-Banai. "I did work a lot on the script with her. The mother, she's 42 years old, she lost her husband, she has four kids, she's a woman, no one touched for nine months. She has this new option, maybe, in the story. Her character was changed while rewriting the script, in the sense that she wanted the time for the character to be more vivid, to have more life. I was all the time pushing her down, saying, 'You're tired! You keep on putting out fires. You carry your body [slouched].' And she would say, 'I want to live, I want to have maybe this new option, I want to be glamorous, in a way. I had to say, 'It's not a Hollywood film! You're not going to have makeup in the bath.' But she rounded the character for me. When you see her on screen, she does carry herself slouchy, she is tired, but then she has these moments where you can see her potential before and after the film."

He asks me about a serial-killer thriller I'm seeing right afterwards, and he dismisses genre movies. "The truth is, I usually don't like genre films at all. I feel like I've seen this film before. But he cites an influence a lot of thirtysomething directors bring up these days. "My favorite junk entertainment will be sports films. I could see 'Major League,' I could see that tons of times. I don't like horror films or romantic comedies. When I was 17, the film that made me want to make films was the Robert Redford film, 'Ordinary People.' I watched that like twenty times. I was saying the dialogue. So people could not see the film with me, I was saying the dialogue while I was watching it. I was out of my house when I was 15, I was a bit like thrown out of my house. But I had a VCR. I got some art films, cassettes. I had in my house 'Ordinary People,' 'Last Tango.' I had five, I remember these two. People would come to my house [because] I lived alone already. I guess 'Ordinary People' touched me in such a deep way, it was like the way I was going to do a film was to want to touch people in the way I was touched as a teenager seeing this film. I don't think I can see it today. There's too much psychology in it. But I still think it's great."

"Broken Wings" opens Friday.

(2004-03-31)

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