It was the best of times and the worst to release a political war strategy film about the Arab-Israeli conflict; the age of hate and support; the era of international denunciations and legitimate defense; the season of resolutions and blockade. It was the autumn of despair, but the film itself is not to blame for the (un)timeliness of the event. Golda, production between the United Kingdom and the United States directed by the Israeli Guy Nattiv, is not a biopic to the use of the former Prime Minister of Israel between 1969 and 1974, Golda Meir; It is the war story of the Yom Kippur War, the conflict that pitted the Jewish state against a group of Arab countries led by Egypt and Syria in 1973, exposed from the engine room of the government and the highest Israeli military commanders, and arrives in theaters at a good bad time. The story not of two cities, but of two cultures.
Is it possible to analyze a film like Golda, set 50 years ago, without taking into account what is happening today? Maybe yes in the purely cinematographic, technical and artistic aspects, but it would be a mistake to leave aside current events because all cinema has something political, and this title infinitely more so. Even its existence as a product of the year 2023 has a lot of political character, especially considering that, from its base, it is an all-out defense, bordering on hagiography, of Meir's mandate and personality. The woman who led a war from the offices while dealing with serious lymphoma, although without separating from her lips the irresistible aroma of one cigarette after another, something in which the director formally delights, and in an excessively lapped way. The woman who, aware of her mistakes and the death of hundreds of soldiers, ended up writing in her memoirs: “I will have to live until the end of my days knowing something so terrible.” A phrase that her interpreter, Helen Mirren—in an excellent job of composition, aided by makeup—explicitly cites in Golda, although not in his writings but in front of the Agranat Commission of 1974, with which the story opens and closes, and which freed all politicians from blame, assigning them to the military.
There are many parallels between that Yom Kippur conflict and the most recent events in the war between Israel and Gaza, with Hamas at the forefront. The surprise attack by Syria and Egypt on the holiest day of the Jewish year, in the style of Hamas during the Sukkot holiday on October 7, 2023. The incomprehensible and controversial errors of the Mossad espionage and eavesdropping system, which are not They found out about the attacks well in advance: 50 years ago, and now. The US insistence on opening a humanitarian corridor. And even a casual and capricious rounding off: the death a few days ago of former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, very present in the film, and played by Liev Schreiber. “Call Kissinger,” Meir says when hostilities begin, finishing off the phone with a phrase that is almost childish in its irony: “Henry, I'm having trouble with the neighbors again.”
For lovers of political cinema (and here is this critic), all of the above may be of interest, but Golda It is not a good film, but rather an often incomprehensible and undramatic gibberish of war strategy and army movement, articulated from a somewhat stale formal grandiloquence and, yes, with fundamental flashes documentaries (especially at the end) that remember the importance of Meir and Anwar Sadat, president of Egypt, and the subsequent Camp David agreements.
A film that plays too much on flattery, on the explanation of the blunder and on the retrospective wink, instead of embracing the complexity of geopolitics and the ideals of each other. And in such senses, that of the broad brush of the compliment and that of the dialogues written from the advantage of the time that has passed, one of them takes the cake. When Meir contradicts the then commander Ariel Sharon, later accused of war crimes for his indirect responsibility in the Sabra and Shatila massacre, about an operation, he tells him: “Arik, you will have your chance, you will become prime minister.”
Golda
Address: Guy Nattiv.
Performers: Helen Mirren, Liev Schreiber, Camille Cottin, Rami Heuberger.
Gender: political drama. United Kingdom, 2023.
Duration: 100 minutes.
Premiere: December 15.
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