A False Prophet
This picture has all the self-seriousness and naivety of a TV-drama. Some of the editing and cinematography pieces try so hard at hooking our eyes and creating a sense of composition, yet somehow they drown us out more than they captivate us. The movie has Helen Mirren vomiting blood, smoking herself to death, undergoing strokes and nightmares, going overwrought, blatantly obliging the audience’s sympathy by posing her like a sacrificial victim, but not really giving us any reason to feel her pain. She just acts very much like it, but the artificial solemnity takes away any remains of a soul left in the person we see before our eyes.
It may be that “all art is propaganda”, but this one has the courage to try and justify even the most obvious and recognized of Golda Meir’s crimes and failures. Directed by Guy Nattiv, this may not be a very coherent movie, but it is at least zionist propanganda done well. At the onset of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, the film forgot to mention Sadat’s real intent of his invasion, which was merely to restore the lost territory of the Sinai desert (“every grain of sand on our soil”, reported Haughey for NYT in 1971), rather than to threaten the existence of the state of Israel, which the film would have liked you to believe (for a more accurate picture of how she allowed her arrogance to blind her from the prospect of war in 1973, Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk has a book named Not by Omission).
The character’s flagrant racism is another aspect the film dared not even suggest, when she supported to keep the recently-seized Gaza Strip from the 1967 war while “getting rid of its Arabs” (Avi Raz’s The Bride and the Dowry), or when she famously remarked quote “There was no such thing as Palestinians, they never existed” (so she told Frank Giles in an interview for the Sunday Times soon after she assumed premiership in 1969, a statement she stood by later in an interview with the NYT in 1972). “How can we return the occupied territories? There is nobody to return them to? We can’t send it to Nasser by parcel post” (she was not referring to Palestine: she was saying that about the Sinai Peninsula that Israel stolen from Egypt from an earlier conflict).
Perhaps even more so than Phyllida Lloyd’s god-awful Thatcher biopic, this movie thinks that it’s paying respect to women by hurrahing “GIRL POWER” with ideas of blood lust and hatred. “You must decide, Henry, side with me, or I will create an army of orphans and widows, and I will slaughter them all. Whose side are you on? You must choose”, she said with anger after the one and only Henry Kissinger, who reluctantly shifted from his earlier racist contempt for the Arabs to a willingness for peace-talks, visited her to convince her onboard for an end to the war, one which she might have liked to continue so she could show the world how much she cared about the dead soldiers and their families. You know how bad it gets when you realize that you had to side with Kissinger on this one.
★★☆☆
Originally published at https://letterboxd.com/redmoonrising/film/golda-2023/
