22/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: Guy Nattiv’s elegantly directed biopic owes much of its quality to Helen Mirren’s staggering portrayal of Israel’s first female prime minister

Helen Mirren in Golda

A woman, a mother for her family, a grandmother for her country, a politician and, inevitably, a military strategist. These are the main nuances of Helen Mirren’s complex portrayal of Golda Meir, Israel’s fourth prime minister (and the first woman to hold the post), a Labour Party member and a chain smoker. Directed by Israeli helmer Guy Nattiv (Skin) and showcased as a Berlinale Special Gala screening at this year’s Berlinale, the whole of Golda [+see also:
trailer
film profile] focuses on the tense days of the Yom Kippur War, which saw Israel fighting against a coalition of Arab states led by Anwar Sadat’s Egypt and Hafez al-Assad’s Syria in 1973.

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It is not by chance that this review begins by pointing out the depth of Mirren’s performance. Despite being elegantly directed, most – if not all – of the picture’s strength does indeed rely on the British actress’s refined work on evoking (without mimicking) Meir’s voice and posture, brilliantly showing the stateswoman’s willpower, but also her fragility. This is not to say that the rest of the cast does not deliver good performances – all of the supporting actors manage to do a fair job, particularly Liev Schreiber as Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Rami Heuberger as the troubled general Moshe Dayan and Ellie Percy as Shir Shapiro, Meir’s affectionate personal secretary.

Aesthetically speaking, the presence of the smoke in particular plays an essential role. It is not just one of Meir’s two fatal addictions (the other was black coffee), but it actually appears on screen in different circumstances, with different meanings: the dust left behind by bombings, an omen of death, nightmarish visions and, more generally, the politician’s state of confusion and hopelessness. In one of the most striking oneiric scenes, Meir lies on her bed and exhales some smoke that rapidly transforms into a huge cloud of fog. A series of shots edited with numerous jump-cuts follow Meir desperately answering the phone – with no one speaking on the other end – while the sound of air strikes and piercing screams seems to get closer and closer, giving viewers the feeling that someone is approaching her to capture or kill her.

That being said, we must take into account two important considerations. The first, most obvious, one is that the feature is a one-sided form of narration – and unsurprisingly so, since it focuses on the sole perspective of Israel’s government and army, and it never aims to be a “testament” of absolute truth. The second consideration implies that many dialogues and the entire wartime setting in general inevitably resonate with the present, especially when we look at the scenes involving Kissinger and Meir as they discuss the Soviet Union’s involvement in the conflict. These connections emerge even when Nattiv adds some light, humorous touches to “sweeten” those scenes and make the Israeli stateswoman more (grand)motherly. In one such sequence, for example, Meir forces Kissinger to taste the borscht soup made by one of her housekeepers before discussing business and treating him as a friend.

As in many other tales of this kind, Nattiv tries to highlight a generic anti-war message by showing Meir lying in her hospital bed before passing away and playing a recording of her historic post-war meeting with Sadat in 1977. In the ending credits, he also states that the film is dedicated to all of the victims of the war, regardless of their affiliation with either of the warring parties. Here, we cannot doubt Nattiv’s best intentions, but a more effective delivery of this message would have required a totally different picture, one which would have inevitably implied a concrete on-screen presence of the “others”, as well as a more critical eye cast on his country’s moral ambiguities.

Golda was produced by the UK’s Qwerty Films and Perfume Films. Embankment Films is handling its international sales.

Photogallery 20/02/2023: Berlinale 2023 - Golda

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Guy Nattiv, Helen Mirren, Lior Ashkenazi
© 2023 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it