Haifa Dispatch. 1.

Years before the state of Israel was founded, Haifa was Palestine's principal commercial city, thanks to an industrial port that the British built there in the late 19th century. Now Haifa has been overshadowed by Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but it remains a charming and livable city on hills that arise above the Mediterranean, and a place where Jews and Arabs live together in relative peace.

Haifa, where the festival which ended on October 26 celebrated its 21st year, is not the best-known film festival in Israel. Jerusalem has that hallowed status, as it has just about every other hallowed status. But it is an event with a strong local audience that catalyzes life in the city, with performances and food in a plaza in front of the theaters. It is also the place where you can see the annual production of Palestinian films - one-stop shopping, as it were.

Another opportunity at a festival like this one is to see films that don't make it to the major festivals. These tend to be films that only Israelis will see, if even they get a chance to see them. Most but not all of them are comedies. Not all of them are good.

A case in point is Comrade by Eyal Shiray. The film starts out as a family drama about Ilan, a teenager with a stern intolerant father who leaves home and flees to join his sister in Haifa. He seems to be struggling with all the problems of the early stages of puberty, spying on his sister Dalya in the shower and retreating into a small room to masturbate. She's a few years older and seems to have come through her own sexual awakening, the worse and the lonelier for the wear.

Enter another lonely malcontent, the bald eccentric Avram, a scrappy communist who spent years in the military and is now bivouacking in a squat in a neighborhood coveted by real estate developers. Avram befriends the two teenagers with his humor and his defiance of authority. Avram is played by Assi Dayan, the well-known actor and director who is also the son of the former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. He's nothing if not irreverent, and he hams it for everything it's worth.

That defiance goes a lot farther than I anticipated from anything made in Israel. (The rest of the audience was less surprised than I was, since the film is adapted from a book that was an Israeli bestseller.) When contractors approach Avram's fortified flat, where Ilan has also taken refuge, the old fighter fights back with rocket-propelled grenades, destroying two trucks. He then shoots at anyone who hasn't run away. It's hard to take seriously, but it still is armed violence - in the middle of an Israeli city. Haifa, we should note, hasn't been bombed much, which explains the shock after the one bombing two years ago of a restaurant owned jointly by Jews and Arabs which killed 15 people.

Is Comrade terrorism humor? Americans might have treated it with indignation, but the Israeli audience around me laughed out loud, especially when Avram mocked the official bureaucrat-ese speculating on the events unfolding - "a hostage situation, on the part of a gunman with an agenda that we know little about."

Eventually Avram dies in an auto-da-fe organized by an explosives commando - this part drew a little less laughter from the audience - and the children return to their ordinary lives, chastened, as you might expect, by the experience. Yet if you believe the film, terrorism is still a joke when it's carried out by a cartoonish guy who's mad as hell and can't take it any more.

It's hard to imagine that too many Israelis will see this one, even though Assi Dayan is a bona fide Israeli star. It's even harder to imagine that any Americans will ever see Comrade. This film won't even make it to Jewish film festivals in the US, which seem ready to show anything Israeli. Perhaps this one is too Israeli. This time the awkward satire on terrorism is as politically incorrect as you can get.

Politically incorrect in a slightly different way was Belly Dancer, by Marek Rozenbaum, which also premiered at Haifa. Among other things, it's a crime thriller. Israelis to whom I spoke kept referring to Belly Dancer as a B-movie, although so few movies are made in Israel that "A" or "B" status can't mean much.

The story centers on Debbie, a radiantly pretty Jewish girl with a prodigious talent for - you guessed it - belly dancing. We're alerted to violence on the horizon when we see that Debbie's manager, Yaki, is a gangster. Then we learn that the bar in which Debbie dances is owned by a low-level hood, Goldie. It's also hinted that there might be some social satire in the mix when we meet Yossi, a pudgy accomplice who has now joined a yeshiva.

Yaki (played by a former Israeli male super model) cheats gloatingly on Debbie. After he's jailed for his role in the trio's burglarizing of a diamond merchant's Judaica collection , Debbie gets her revenge and starts an an affair with Goldie. The two lovers then hide the stolen Judaica in her parents' rural village, but they're betrayed. It seems that the informant is the oafishly pathetic Yossi, who is shot for his dishonor. Then the two retreat into religion - Goldie grows a beard and reads the Torah, and Debbie tries belly-dancing in a conservative ultra-Orthodox costume. If you think that's hard to believe, you're right. I won't give away any more of the story.

The film seemed absurd to me, yet a few of my Israeli friends saw a critical logic in the mess. The key was religion, they said, and the film targeted the practice among orthodox religious groups of recruiting "penitential" criminals and thugs. "Even a lot of these rabbis are thugs," I was told. Now we know. But we probably won't know more, since it's unlikely that Belly Dancer will spend more than a week or two in Israeli cinemas.

More promising in Haifa was the modest film that won the prize for Israeli features, Frozen Days, which follows a young woman's search for a prospective lover she's met online through the icy halls of an empty shopping mall. The no-budget black-and-white thriller is cinematically inventive - that's unusual for Israeli films, which all too often seem to tailor their images to the television screen. Oddly, that's where this film was destined until it played at Haifa. Maybe that's being reconsidered now. It's an encouraging beginning for Danny Lerner.

The Haifa Festival was also the venue for the Israeli premiere of Paradise Now, the much-seen, much-discussed Palestinian film by Hany Abu-Assad about suicide bombers (which began as a script supported by the Israel Film Fund). I had seen the film in Berlin, where it was received as a courageous unprecedented look at a previously unexamined subject. At the New York Film Festival, the press seemed to think it was realism. In Haifa, the notion that Paradise Now was realistic made people laugh. In fact, the entire film did. The Israelis I spoke to weren't indignant at the humanizing of middle class alienated young men who became bombers. What they kept citing was the comedy of two bombers dressed in business suits, the "men in black" who couldn't get the camera to work when they filmed their pre-suicide  manifesto. Hope (or at least tolerance) through humor? Stay tuned.

Posted by dwhudson at October 27, 2005 3:12 PM