Hen Pauker
Dr. Manuel A. Pérez Tejada
English 1102 D2
02/05/09

Dror Shaul’s contrast

Dror Shaul is an Israeli film maker. He was born on 1971 in Kibbutz kisufim that is in the south of Israel. Kibbutz is a collective community in Israel that was traditionally based on agriculture; the kibbutz is a form of communal living that combines socialism and Zionism. Dror Shaul came to prominence with the release of his first film, the 50-minute Operation Grandma, a comedy with a focus on the kibbutz experience. It is considered a cult movie, especially among kibbutzniks (people who lives in the Kibbutz). He returned to the kibbutz with his second full-length feature, Sweet Mud, a drama following an unhappy childhood in the kibbutz. It won an Israeli Film Academy Best Picture Award and a Sundance Grand Jury Prize. Shaul has confirmed that both films are based on real-life events. In my essay I will first describe the plots of the movies and then I will present the differences between the movies. I will also show the similarity between them in respect to Shaul’s direction. I will show how Shaul has the same point of view in both movies but one is a comedy that most of the Israeli population liked and the other is a drama that had a lot of criticisms among the Israeli people as a whole and among the kibbutzniks in particular.

Operation Grandma is a comedy film about the Israeli military and kibbutz life. The story took place around Alon, an Israeli Army officer, Benni, a brilliant electrician, and Idan, a wimpy field trip guide. The film is told from Idan's point of view. Three brothers try to bury their grandmother in the kibbutz cemetery. Alon has a secret security operation set for the same day, so they have to work on a very tight schedule. Alon plans it like a military operation, and this is the reason for the film’s title. A series of mistakes and mishaps complicate things. The story takes place in Israel, in the fictional kibbutz "Asisim". Kibbutzim are flourishing as a social system in the 1970s in Israel. The kibbutzim were founded on principles of socialist equality -- each person giving as much as he or she was able, and taking only what he or she needed. The members of the kibbutz provided everything the kibbutz needed to survive as a whole, and in return the kibbutz as a whole took care of the individual needs of its members. (Definition) Kibbutzim were seen by many as social utopias, and many seekers, both Jewish and not, came to the various kibbutzim looking for models on which to found similar communal intentional communities. The humor in the film operation grandma is cultural, involving very specific aspects of Israeli life and culture: the kibbutz, foreign volunteers, army life, school-trips and Tel-Aviv (one of the biggest cities in Israel). In a very funny way, Shaul creates a critic’s film about the Kibbutz and the way things function.

Sweet Mud is an intense drama about a boy with a mentally ill mother. In the year 1974 Dvir, a twelve year old, lives in a Kibbutz in Israel with his mother and older brother. His father died some years earlier, but anyone from the members of the kibbutz will tell Dvir it was not an accident. Dvir's mother, Miri is mentally unstable, and Dvir is trying to do his best to take care of her during the limited time he is allowed to spend with her every day. Early in the film we learn that Miri never recovered from Dvir’s father death. The director manages to convey a child's outrage and perplexity at the way the adults around him abuse his mother and basically shows us the reason for his sadness and occasional fear. We can feel the child's loneliness and empathize with his intense and doomed wish that his troubled but loving mother would behave normally.

There are many different characters in the movie, but Shaul keeps the main sight of the story on the12-year-old Dvir and his mother, Miri. Although at the beginning of the film Dvir’s mom looks charming, young and beautiful, we found out really quickly that she has a history of psychosis and hospitalization. The kibbutz was her husband's home, so they kept her because the members of the Kibbutz felt it is their duty, but they were not happy about being among a woman like her. The kibbutz members of Sweet Mud are much more than a collection of cute eccentrics, as they've been portrayed in Operation Grandma. For example, Avram, who looks and sounds like the stereotypical easy-going kibbutznik, turns out to have an unusually close relationship with the cows he takes care of. A pretty young teacher gives a humorless, ideological sex education lecture that is the film's comic high point, then goes off to continue a loveless affair with a married man. While Shaul does have a sense of humor and, very occasionally, certain affection for the kibbutz residents, it becomes clearer and clearer that they are frustrated people who often treat each other with great cruelty. When that cruelty is turned against a creature as vulnerable as the boy's mother, the results can't be anything other than tragic.

In the film Operation Grandma, Dror Shaul shows the negative side of the kibbutz with all the funny motifs related to the kibbutz. The Israeli audience did not see the negative side of the movie because of the fact that it is a comedy movie. Even though it is obvious that through the comedy movie Shaul criticizes the kibbutz characters harshly, the fact that this is a comedy movie even flattered the kibbutzniks citizens. On the other hand, Sweet Mud groups all the evil dark life of the kibbutz in a drama movie. The entire film is shades and taupe, which increase the sense of gloom. The scenes engaged with an absurd gathering of members asking the community’s permission for banal things. The figures have lack of empathy, contempt reactions in particular acts and even violence against a child just to protect a friend from the Kibbutz. The only positive characters in the film are the result of intervention of an outside person that comes from another culture. Parents are supposed to have a suitable Kibbutz child, and if anyone dares to think otherwise, this is not plausible.

I am aware of the existence of these negative and sometimes terrifying things that exist in the kibbutzim. But this negative perspective that exists in the film, along with the general neglect gray shades, takes the viewer to a dark place. Perhaps that is the director’s sharing childhood days on the kibbutz, but not in an objective way that the film Operation Grandma does. In operation grandma Dror Shaul is making fun of the kibbutz, it feels like there is something bitter in the film but the comedy is taking control and “does not” let you feel that way. I think that on his first successful movie – operation grandma, Dror Shaul was afraid of the audience’s reaction to a harsh kibbutz film so he “examines us” by combining funny aspects of a film that worked. After his success he got more confidence from his audience’s fans and made a more critical movie and maybe allowed himself to expose his real feeling about the kibbutz from when he was a child. In my opinion, Dror Shaul made two great movies that both give the audience a bitter perspective about the kibbutz but in the same time gives us different moods and different levels of seriousness.



Work Cited
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117969323.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&query=sweet+mud
http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117969323.html?categoryid=13&cs=1&query=sweet+mud
http://www.kibbutz.org.il/itonut/kibbutzim/061012_adama.htm?nojump (interview with Dror Shaul in one of the famous newspapers in Israel 02/27/2007).

More…
http://boxoffice.com/reviews/2008/08/sweet-mud.php
http://www.nrg.co.il/online/5/ART1/703/183.html
http://www.movingpicturesmagazine.com/reviews/movies/sweetmud