Ahed’s Knee review – sublime style in service of a mostly frustrating story
With hard-to-like characters and limited emotional reward, this polemical Israeli satire often feels like being yelled at by a stranger
Out of all the Competition prize-winners at Cannes 2021, Ahed’s Knee arrives in the UK with by far the least fanfare, rolled out as a midweek streaming curio – no Memoria-esque headline-grabbing release strategy, let alone the international love-in that greeted Drive My Car and The Worst Person in the World. It doesn’t take long to work out why, though – Nadav Lapid’s latest film (his last, Synonyms, didn’t get a UK release at all) is a truly obstinate beast. It’s never exactly bad, but this is a difficult film about difficult subject matter populated by difficult people and only offering meagre rewards.
Telling a partly autobiographical story, Lapid has us follow Y (Avshalom Pollak), an Israeli director who has recently found success at the Berlin Film Festival (where Lapid himself won the Golden Bear in 2019), but is struggling to shape his follow-up project. His eye has been drawn to the (real life) story of Palestinian teenager Ahed Tamimi, who was imprisoned for slapping an Israeli soldier before receiving torrents of abuse online, including a man wishing she had been shot in the knee. Y wants to focus on the knee itself in his casting process, pushing him into more “video art” than movie territory, but he still needs to get funding.
As it turns out, there’s a vague promise of money in the Arava, a barely-populated region in the southeast of Israel, where a small but very well-connected library wants to screen one of Y’s previous films and pay him for a follow-up Q+A. Harbouring a lot of hatred for the Israeli state and its connections to these sorts of institutions, not to mention an overwhelming guilt from an incident in his own time in the IDF, Y heads off to Arava, but quite quickly finds himself having some sort of slow breakdown in the desert.
This breakdown – across the course of a single day – forms the bulk of Ahed’s Knee, which is only compelling in fits and starts. Pollak’s intense and effective performance seethes with anger and regret, but Y’s inflated self-regard make him tough to spend a lot of time with, a challenge in a film where he’s rarely out of the frame. Soon after his arrival in the Arava, Y makes a flirty but argumentative acquaintance with local Culture Ministry representative Yahalom (Nur Fibak), and though Pollak and Fibak do share a solid chemistry, a lot of their dialogue scenes just go round and round in circles.
This is partly the point, Ahed’s Knee concerning itself with the difficulty of discussions in a country that hates any and all dissident thought, but what is certainly clever on paper can be frustrating in practice. What really keeps Ahed’s Knee going, then, is Lapid’s relentless stylishness, finding beauty and chaos working in tandem in almost every shot. Lapid doesn’t just put you into his characters’ headspace, he fires you in there with a cannon, every emotional swing accompanied by a camera lurch, whilst the stark winter light keeps fading as Y approaches the crescendo of his distress.
Lapid and his camera team are constantly finding ingenious, thrilling ways to match feeling and form – as a piece of purely visual art, it’s hard to fault. Yet, it’s all in service of a mostly alienating story that ends up having less to say it seems to think it does, even as it’s yelling at you at the top of its lungs.
Ahed's Knee is now showing on MUBI.
Where to watch
