Conformity
on the kibbutz

>>Israeli commune drama Sweet Mud
is compelling but heavy-handed

by MALCOLM FRASER

The latest from Israeli director Dror Shaul, Sweet Mud, won several Israeli Academy Awards including Best Picture, as well as prizes at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals. The story takes place on a kibbutz in 1974; 12-year-old Dvir (Tomer Steinhof), an absent-minded dreamer who is already an outcast in the conformity-minded commune, becomes even more stigmatized when his mentally `unstable mother Miri (Ronit Yudkevitz) brings her Swiss boyfriend, the much older and gentile Stephan (Henri Garcin), onto the kibbutz for a visit. When Stephan commits a fatal faux pas and is forced to leave, Miri’s fragile mental state deteriorates even further, forcing her son to take care of her and mature before his time.

Shaul based the film on his own experience of growing up on a kibbutz, and if the story is at all autobiographical, you have to feel sorry for the poor guy. The socialist nature of the experiment is presented as unequivocally wrong-headed, a hotbed of mindless groupthink and vindictive reprisals against individual behaviour. The adults are portrayed as mean-spirited, authoritarian and perverse; the particularly nasty Avraham (Shai Avivi) is not only abusiveq-1 but has sexual relations with animals. Undoubtedly, some aspects of the kibbutz mentality were misguided (like the practice of forcing kids to live apart from their parents, which was discontinued in the ’80s), but a portrayal with some shades of grey would have made the film more powerful.

Just as the film’s moral perspective lacks subtlety, the drama is unrelenting. Both Steinhof and Yudkevitz give great performances, but their characters suffer well past the point of melodrama, their troubles accented with egregious swelling strings and melancholy piano. Throw in some overt symbolism, like the puzzle Yudkevitz struggles to complete throughout the film, and you come away wishing Shaul had invested in a subtlety consultant.

The film has a lot going for it: a strong cast, compelling characters, an inherently interesting setting, excellent cinematography and touches of humour, which alternate between both dark and light. All these, however, just make its fatal flaws more unfortunate, because Sweet Mud could have been a great film; as it is, it’s worth seeing but falls short of its potential.

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