Directed by Keren Yedaya
Hebrew and Arabic with English subtitles.
(Israel/Germany/France)
105 min. Color.

As part of the Toronto Jewish Film Festival, this bilingual film is a melodrama with special sensitivities. Officially screened at a number of international film festivals, Jaffa is accounted one of those films that seek to break down racial, cultural, and religious barriers. Although not her best work, Jaffa shows that Keren Yedaya’s heart is in the right place. It is an uneven film (the colour cinematography sometimes has an unseemly green cast) that is a Mid-East Romeo and Juliet tragedy of sorts, though the script (which Yedaya co-authored) lets it down at times, failing to ward off melodrama and failing to develop some of the characters beyond their surface characteristics. Set in the seaside Israeli city of Jaffa (historically nicknamed “Bride of the Sea” by Israelis), the story is framed by the image of the sea, that mysterious formless force that nurtures as well as destroys. But the heart of the tense story is set in Reuven’s Garage, a family-run business, where tragic violence breaks out between Reuven Wolf’s ill-tempered lout of a son, Meir, and Tewfik, the young Palestinian mechanic who labours in the garage with his own docile father. When Tewfik, who has secretly been in love for years with Reuven’s young daughter Mali, takes time off from work one day without permission (he is really trying to secure the necessary papers to marry the already-pregnant Mali), ill-tempered and racist Meir precipitates a violent confrontation that leads to his own accidental death. New tensions flare up, with terrible emotional burdens for both families.

As in Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy, this is a story of two feuding houses, though the film approaches this theme more allegorically than literally, except through the racist bias of Meir. Reuven’s wife, Ossi, is an indulgent sensualist who seems to do nothing other than cook, eat, watch television on a sofa, and have her feet massaged by her patient husband. However, she does give vent to her own racist feelings from time, though these become vehement only after Meir’s death. Reuven’s bitter hostility to the Palestinians is more over his daughter’s pregnancy out of wedlock and his son’s death, so the history behind the tribal feud is funneled into a domestic drama, thereby becoming generalized and simplistic.

But even as domestic drama, the film has flaws. Though Ronit Elkabetz gives a beautiful sketch of Ossi, she has only a sliver of text to work with. Ro’I Assaf’s Meir also has to play on a narrow plane, but because he is a villain, the role affords colour and force to the actor. Moni Moshonov’s Reuven is an interesting sketch of a conflicted man, caught between his benign intentions and his instincts for revenge. The most interesting (and also the most ironic) thing about the family dynamic is the shift from disgust at Meir to an extravagant memorialization of him after his death. Alas, the central story is not given a proper balance. In fact, the two lovers sometimes disappear as dramatic forces. Mahmud Shalaby acts correctly as Tewfik, showing his honest work ethic, love for Mali and his own tribe, and, like Romeo, he is at the mercy of forces beyond himself, but the film contains a nine-year gap, spanning his incarceration for Meir’s death and his eventual release, so when he is finally brought face to face with his estranged lover and his “illegitimate” daughter, the drama is diluted by the absence of complications. There is also the whole question of Mali, for though there is an intriguing strength in the character’s apparent passivity (something that marks and mars Dana Ivgy’s attempt at characterization), there is also a near-fatal drift away from the essence of drama.

Yet, Jaffa’s weaknesses are sometimes its strengths. What may seem like tenuous references to deeper issues become tantalizing. Modern Israel can build a mighty wall to keep out enemies, but the truly powerful wall is that which is not literal: the wall of prejudice that bedevils life and the future. The Wolf family has insulated itself from reality by fear, lies, denial, and rage, and some of its members pay a harsh price for this. There is heartache in the final scene by the sea, as Tewfik watches from afar as his little daughter Shiran plays and his former beloved Mali watches him watch the girl. Sometimes what is unspoken can be more potent than the rhetoric of explicit passion. 

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