Tel Aviv is a Small Tiger, as seen through the Eyes of Gur Bentwich

It is no mistake that Gur Bentwich’s graduate film from 1991 begins with a shot of a washing machine rattling on a Tel Aviv rooftop, with a man looking at the woman next door, who happens to be growing a marijuana plant, just like him. The rooftop serves as a Tel Aviv icon. All kinds of things happen on Tel Aviv’s rooftops, away from the law and the country’s regulation. “The state of lettuce in the territories” is a phrase that was used once, years ago; it’s a reference to something marginal and esoteric, maybe like the subject of the Palestinians or the subjects in the films Bentwich would go on to make. “Lettuce” is a popular nickname for marijuana. And how’s it been doing? Terribly. “I have black dots on my plant,” complains the woman and goes out with her male neighbor on a strange journey to investigate the reason for the problem. They end up coming back to the rooftop and smoking a joint. This is how life in Tel Aviv has always been.

“A country in waiting.” These are the words Kobi Oz used to describe Tel Aviv’s old central bus station in the sentimental hit by Teapacks. Mulli, Planet Blue’s protagonist, gets off the bus and already wants to buy another ticket for Cairo. From there, he might continue to Thailand or India. Planet Blue relates to people waiting for “change.” They are done waiting. Leaving Tel Aviv to go anywhere, to the unknown, to the illusion. Drugs in Planet Blue are not presented directly, but as an abstract scripted overtone appearing as a lingering spirit. Psychedelics have always been referred to as an entryway to different worlds – alien, interplanetary, timeless. Planet Blue’s dimension seeks external redemption. A bus suddenly passes by, honks, and the camera follows it. A sign appears: “Tel Aviv’s New Central Bus Station will open on 18.8.1993,” like Marty Macfly in Back to the Future 3 when he goes back to 1885 and finds out about the future construction of the clock tower from Back to the Future 1. Past and future collide, old and new. Cities rise and fall and maybe aliens will show up soon and take us away from here.

Who’s the old woman behind the window bars, looking more like prison bars or concentration camp bars? What is the meaning of “good heart”? And who’s “Pappy”? She speaks in melancholic gibberish. These old women lived in Tel Aviv since the establishment of the State. They were lonesome holocaust survivors, deemed “crazy,” battered by trauma, dead animals, trapped in their apartments, but driven by terrifying memories. The body’s in Tel Aviv, but the soul remains over there, inhabiting the regions of terror and death. A constant exile. The old woman mumbles as though she were hallucinating. During Eichmann’s trial, Ka-Tsetnik described Auschwitz as an Other Planet. He expressed a feeling of disconnect from the tangible. As though the Nazi violence occurred in a different world. It would appear as though the old woman is still there, in the dimension of terror. Planet Blue is not just a film dealing with trauma, but a film navigating the borders of what is and what is not. It places doubt on what we’re capable of capturing and what we’re not. Maybe there’s only this world? And maybe there’s no Planet Blue? Aren’t there any external, mysterious powers? Maybe Tel Aviv is all there is, with all the “crazies” that inhabit it?

Today’s not my day, I need to go abroad,” declares Mulli, “I think it’s my time for a change…I need to go.” Once again, the recurrent theme in Bentwich’s films – leaving, traveling, changing, taking off, to be and not to be. Planet Blue is everywhere and nowhere, the antithesis of the real (too real?) present-day Tel Aviv. In fact, this entire movie deals with the concept of arrival. And if arrival is even possible – what is the actual destination? It’s never clear. Tel Aviv alone remains as a hopeful harbor or altar of sorts. Something steady within the twisted and complex reality. Is it a good place? And if its so good, then why leave?

To paraphrase Chekhov’s famous words, a central station that appears in the first act must open the third act. Mulli arrives at the architectural wonder of the 90s. An intimidating building turned into a horrible monster. Not yet visible are the abandonment, filth, refugees, and junkies, scattered amongst the occasional travelers. The escalators go up and down. Neon lights gleam from the ceiling. It looks like a completely futuristic scene. Everything is brand new. The sloping walls look like spaceships. The fluorescent green EXIT sign appears on the right. And more signs. יציאה, EXIT, יציאה,, EXIT. “My bus line leads to Planet Blue, because my whole existence is over there,” Mulli says to himself. In the next scene, he’s dirty and has already gotten stubbles. Maybe the bus to Planet Blue will never arrive. To quote Dr. Seuss, “All that waiting and staying.” In the meantime, we’re stuck in purgatory, neither heaven nor hell, a temporary situation between EXIT and EXIT. Central Station.

“What have we got here anyway?” Renana (Tinkerbell) asks Haim (Maor Cohen). This is the question that has most defined Israel and Zionism since their vey inception. “What have we got here anyway?” The scene takes place in a typically dilapidated Tel Aviv apartment at the end of the 90s, on the brink of the new millennium. It’s hard not to think to ourselves: How many bedrooms? Where is the apartment located? How high is the property tax? How high was rent back then? The real estate conversation and financial discourse have retroactively seeped into the way in which we view cinema. Total Love’s bohemian and accessible Tel Aviv no longer exists. It’s a Tel Aviv that now seems so distant from the current reality. Afterwards, they travel to Amsterdam and get into trouble in India, all because of a hallucinogenic drug called TLV. Ironically, this is the current nickname for modern-day Tel Aviv, international, of the 2000s, Tel Aviv with its wealth and skyscrapers, herds of tourists, and luxury boutique hotels. In Bentwich’s Total Love, TLV is a title representing liberation, freedom, love. “Worst case scenario, we fall in love,” says the most famous and optimistic sentence in the film. This is not the TLV of “worst case scenario, we’ll make loads of money.” The film ends with a scene on a Tel Aviv rooftop, just like the rooftop in the opening scene in The State of Lettuce. Today, that rooftop houses a penthouse with a jacuzzi.

Nits (Gal Toren) returns from a year-long stay in Australia straight to Tel Aviv after the social protests. He ran away from Tel Aviv to deal with himself, his ex-girlfriend, and face the city – which is undergoing swift changes threatening to intensify very quickly. Up the Wrong Tree presents the struggle against the transformation of a green space into a parking lot. An ironical conflict – financial and architectural that blends with the narrative conflict of the characters themselves. How can Tel Aviv be saved from the forces threatening to turn the city into TLV? Moreover, how do we take care of ourselves, our relationships, our pasts, our identities? The city is changing, and love is vagrant. Love is dynamic, it rises, it falls. Tel Aviv is a living and breathing organism. Capitalism rules over both. This is a complicated web of needs, interests, intuitions, and ideals. The city wants to maximize itself, while the couple observes each other and suddenly asks: Did we just get a good deal? Commercial real estate meets emotional and romantic real estate. What are we going to do so that we don’t get turned into a parking lot?

The fire in the security cabin, shattered glass. What is Nits trying to achieve? Is this altruistic sacrifice or just a self-involved egotistical male? Maybe its both. Reality proves that battered souls can also become activists. The real estate shark’s angry response would prove prophetic years after Up the Wrong Tree would be screened. “Go ahead and laugh, we’ll see who gets the last laugh,” he says. Real estate sharks laugh loudly, but what about the Nitses of the world? Maybe they’re still waiting for their girlfriends to return? Or maybe, they left for Australia broken-hearted never to return?

“I want you to know that I’ve changed.” This might be the loudest statement in the film. Nits really does change. From an ambivalent and scruffy man, he climbs up a tree planted in the middle of a lot and turns into a social activist. But even this doesn’t help him, neither on a personal nor on a municipal level. He carries on failed relationships with his ex-girlfriend and with Tel Aviv (his ex-city?). He doesn’t realize that just as he has changed, so has the city and so has his ex. What was, was. He’s so childish that he refuses to admit it. He holds on to the past, because letting go means giving up. Nits doesn’t want to give up on his girlfriend and on Tel Aviv, but he’s going to have to face the bleak reality. Many of Tel Aviv’s veteran residents are familiar with this feeling as the city is falling apart before their very eyes and turning into something different. And its obvious that this can also happen in a relationship. You wake up one morning and you don’t even recognize the person beside you. You go out on the street and the city isn’t the same. At the end of the film, the green space transforms into a parking lot and Nits loses his magic. “Man screams what he’s missing,” Meir Ariel sings against the subtitles.

This scene could have easily taken place in a derelict bar in Tel Aviv. The loud electronic music, flashing disco lights, distorted sweaty faces. And here’s the big irony. This is an allegory not only for the aging director who suffers a panic attack, but for the body’s betrayal, an aging Tel Aviv bohemian in the big city. One day you’re dancing in a club, and the next day you’re in a wheelchair, waiting in line at the emergency room. Who would have thought? This is also a convincing portrait of the frustrated artist who cannot manage to live the moment while everyone around him celebrates happily, enjoying life and doing coke. The more they celebrate and the more happy they are, the more the filmmaker suffers. Maybe there’s a connection between the two. Between contentment and suffering. Aging in Tel Aviv, a city that rejoices as a means of identity, can cause feelings of discomfort. You stayed behind while the city moved forward. Zuri Shostak tries to remain relevant as a filmmaker and as a person. The effort in itself is enough to cause an imaginary heart attack.

This is probably the film’s most moving and heartbreaking Ars Poetica moment. Moments like these shed light on the sisyphic aspect of filmmaking and artistic creation. The workers putting up the posters represent the apathy of the cosmos toward artistic creation; it’s just another work of art, one in a thousand, one in a million, one in a billion. When one of them asks, “Did you actually think your poster would stay up forever,”? he’s raising the question of questions: Why even create art if it’s so temporary? Peaches and Cream doesn’t pretend to provide an answer to this question. Why? Because. Zuri Shostak is also aware of the fact a film’s lifespan is short and bitter. The poster will come down quickly. As the worker says, it’s a real jungle out there. Tel Aviv’s jungle culture. Everyone sits in cafés, writing scripts, making a movie, filming, producing, editing, pulling budgets together, pursuing television channel heads and film fund directors. Not one moment of grace. And what’s left? A broken dream. A ripped poster, thrown on the asphalt in Tel Aviv.

Once again, we’re faced with the cruelest of questions – the question of relevance. In Bentwich’s first films there was no doubt that the characters represented Tel Aviv’s here and now. And now? Zuri Shostak tries to connect to the spirit of the times and discovers that he’s been left far behind. How far behind? Kilometers, tens of kilometers. He and Billy are oceans apart. She’s not even a person. She’s a generational app. Welcome to the new world. Shenkin of the 90s vs. the ultimate millennial, analogue vs. digital, an old man vs. the new woman. Billy’s room transforms into the boxing rink for cultural, moral, and sexual misrepresentations. It will never end peacefully. “What do you think, we’re in the 90s”? What a blow. The generational gap opens up. No, we’re not in the 90s Zuri. Too bad we can’t go back in time. And the future is also murky. The new bus station will be destroyed soon, that has already become old. It’s no longer Uri Zohar’s Tel Aviv, nor does the city belong to Gur Bentwich, Zuri Shostak, Nits, or Mulli.