'The Lost Love' puts human face on Israel-Palestine conflict

By Hartoyo Pratiknyo

JAKARTA (JP): With so many Hollywood action films and cheaper Asian productions flooding moviehouses all over this country, it is a pity that the best Italian movies still remain absent from Jakarta's regular movie repertoire.

Italy, after all, is where the European film renaissance began after the end of World War II. Before other European countries had even recovered from the daze of destruction, moviemakers in Italy were busy pioneering what has since become known as the neorealist movement in filmmaking.

Turning shortage into a virtue, masters of neorealism such as Vittorio de Sica (Shoeshine, Bicycle Thieves, Miracle in Milan) and Roberto Rossellini (Open City, Paisan, Stromboli) used light, movable equipment and non-professional actors to produce works that made a lasting impact on world cinema. Those were among the films Jakarta's moviegoers were able to see until politics interfered and western movies ceased to be shown.

Italian cinema, however, continued to develop. Works from directors such as Federico Fellini (La Strada, La Dolce Vita) and Michelangelo Antonioni (L'Aventura) in the 1950s and 1960s; Pier- Paolo Passolini (Decamerone, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, Salo) and Bernardo Bertolucci (Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor, Little Buddha) from the 1970s up to the 1990s, and most recently Roberto Benigni with his Oscar-winning Life is Beautiful, are proof that Italian filmmaking has lost none of its vigor over the decades.

Now the newly established Italian Cultural Institute in Jakarta has taken the commendable initiative to screen a series of films representing the newest currents in Italian cinema and to promote retrospectives of the best of Italian cinema.

One of those works that attracted considerable attention during the New Italian Cinema Festival, which was held from Oct. 7 to Oct. 13 at the Usmar Ismail Film Center on Jl. Rasuna Said in Central Jakarta, was Roberto Faenza's The Lost Lover (L'Amante Perduto, 1999).

Based on a novel by Abraham B. Yehoshua, The Lost Lover tells the story of a Jewish couple, Adam and Asya, whose marriage has gone sour after their first-born child, Yigal, was killed in a car accident because of his deafness while they were still living in London.

The film then shifts to Israel and the Palestinian territories, where Adam and Asya (Juliet Aubrey) have gone to live after the death of their child. They now have a 13-year-old daughter, Dafi (Clara Bryant), who is disturbed by the arrival of the young Gabriel, Asya's young assistant with whom she, the mother, falls in love, apparently because he somehow reminds her of the dead Yigal.

The other important character is Naim (Erick Vazquez), a 15- year-old Palestinian garage hand who comes to Tel Aviv from the Palestinian territories on a broken bus to find a job. Naim and the Jewish girl Dafi eventually fall for each other and make love, with obvious consequences.

The rather complicated plot causes the film to lose some of its focus, especially in the beginning. It is only close to the end, when the mother gets to realize the true nature of her affection for young Gabriel (his reminding her of Yigal), that the conflicts are resolved and the relationship between Adam and Asya is restored.

As for Naim and Dafi, Adam is furious when he catches the two in bed in the house when they thought he was going to be absent. He forces Naim to get in his car, dumps him in the desert and tells him "I never want to see your face again" -- only to find that the car won't start when he wants to go home.

Obviously in need of help, Adam calls Naim back but the boy sulkingly retorts that "you never want to see my face again". The film ends with Naim helping Adam push the car back towards the city, the spat apparently resolved. All is well that ends well. What happens next is left to the viewer's imagination.

If all this sounds a little bit trite, it is. Also, one is left to wonder what purpose exactly the presence of Gabriel's grandmother -- who revives from a coma and comes to live with Gabriel -- serves in the film, unless it is to brighten up the screen with a touch of humor.

But then, The Lost Lover is not a film that one should take too literally. In fact, Faenza's tongue-in-cheek treatment of many of its scenes and the sprinklings of whim and humor here and there keeps the film from becoming heavy and melodramatic. The film's ending on a note of hope is typical of almost all of Fuenza's films. The stress on the lives of working class people is a clear legacy of Italian cinema's humanist roots.

The Lost Lover, though, does more than deliver a message of hope -- that even in one of the world's most explosive hotspots, peace and harmony are possible if love is present. Intentionally or not, it helps plant a seed of understanding, however small, by giving a human face to the Arab-Palestine conflict.

Given the considerable size of the audience attending Wednesday's screening of the movie and the applause that it received from the audience, one wonders what is keeping our film importers from bringing in films of this kind for public showing. The market is waiting to be tested.