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Broken Wings
Knafayim Shvurot
review by
Cynthia Fuchs, 20 February 2004
Endless loss
Maya Ullman (Maya Maron) wears
wings when she performs. An aspiring singer-songwriter, she prepares
for a gig by donning black legging, a dusting of face glitter, and a
pair of black gossamer wings. Backstage, just before her band's spot
in a local contest, her mother, Dafna (Orli Zilberschatz-Banai),
tells her she has to come home. Dafna's been called for a night
shift at the hospital where she works as a midwife, and 17-year-old
Maya has to babysit 11-year-old Ido (Daniel Magon) and six-year-old
Bahr (Eliana Magon, who dubbed Lilo's voice in Hebrew for Lilo &
Stitch).
At the start of Broken Wings,
Maya declares Maya declares her independence, telling her mother
that she won't give up her chance at potential stardom, and then, in
the next moment, she appears riding her bicycle through the dark
streets of Haifa, her broken wings quivering behind her. She arrives
home just in time to help Dafna jumpstart the unreliable family car
by pushing it down a hill. Thus established as a dependable, if
reluctant, "angel," Maya puts her siblings to bed and shuts herself
in her bedroom to listen to the contest on the radio. When her band
performs, the good-looking guitarist Yoram (Danny Niv) sings the
song she wrote -- not very well, but poignantly. Maya smiles,
imagining what might have been.
Meantime, Maya's twin brother, Yair
(Nitai Gvirtz), comes home late, after riding the subway all night.
He's dropped out of high school (where Maya is also struggling), and
has taken a job handing out advertising flyers to passengers. It's
no coincidence that for this gig, he dresses as a mouse, with
enormous head and scrawny tail. The costume, like Maya's wings,
designates an emotional state. He feels small and trapped, he's quit
playing basketball (which he apparently loved), and he's stopped
interacting with his family, except for brief exchanges with Maya,
whom he calls "Skeleton," referring to her emaciated appearance,
itself an allusion to her emotional neediness. The girl is starving
for attention, even as Yair is rejecting it. "Your words are
meaningless," he tells a school counselor. "This conversation does
not exist and you don't exist." No surprise, he rejects her
suggestion that he needs psychological treatment.
The cause of the family's pain and
privation isn't novel, but it is resonant: nine months earlier,
their father died of an allergic reaction to a bee sting, suffered,
it so happens, while he was out for an afternoon with Maya. This
explains her special agony, her sense of guilt, her persistent
efforts to please her mother. It also explains, to an extent,
Dafna's unwillingness to comfort her daughter, and instead, to
expect perpetual repentance. The mother's attitude is less cruel
than it is a function of trauma; she's so wrapped up with surviving
her own long hours and paying rent for their tiny apartment that she
hardly notices Maya's pain; and when a doctor, Valentin (Vladimir
Friedman), shows her kindness, Dafna is unable to respond
coherently, angry one minute and devastated the next.
Broken Wings' investigation
of profound emotional damage is, predictably, most poignant with
regard to the younger children. Increasingly fractious and confused
by their mother's (and sister and brother's) distance, little Bahr
has taken to locking herself in the bathroom to avoid going to
school, and Ido has picked up an odd hobby: after school, he takes
his video camera to an empty public swimming pool, where he tries to
tape himself falling.
While first time filmmaker Nir
Bergman solicits moving performances from his actors (see especially
Maron, who manages to be both delicate and steely at the same time),
the film leans heavily on visual symbolism to make its points. If
only Dafna could spend time with her own children instead of
birthing others; if only Maya could share her feelings with her
family, rather than pouring her heart into a song they won't hear;
if only Ido would stop throwing himself onto cold concrete.
These bits of metaphor accumulate,
of course, leading to a literal tragedy that pulls the family back
together. While the melodrama can be overbearing -- Maya's tears on
hearing her song played back to her, Yair's stoicism crumbling when
a friend threatens suicide, Dafna's eventual realization that she
has to be the adult -- Broken Wings is most effective when it
steps back from overt representation. Its interest in suffering and
loss emerges in an environment suffused with misfortune and misery.
Though the movie never directly references the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict, its implications are everywhere. As Maya, Dafna, and Yair
must learn to forgive one another, they are survivors -- of sudden
trauma and endless loss. |
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