From the opening sequences, in which crackpot
mental-hospital patient Moni Moshonov holds a skull aloft and quotes
extensively from Hamlet while a catatonic soldier slumps against a tree in the background, Forgiveness feels like a high-concept stage
play, the kind of well-meant but pretentious project where grand themes are
worked out in a claustrophobic setting among a small cast. While Israeli-born
director Udi Aloni (Local Angel) opens up the settings to include location shooting in New
York City and Israel, and operates with a complicated timeline, he never shakes
that feeling of a small, crowded stage.
Itay Tiran plays the son of Auschwitz survivor
Michael Sarne, whose meek mixed guilt and pride in his heritage drives Tiran to
a defiantly single-minded Zionism: He picks a fight at a Middle East peace
rally, gets the star of David tattooed on his chest, moves to Israel to enlist
in the army, and feels baffled when he's attracted to a Palestinian woman in a
nightclub. Then something happens that leaves him catatonic; the audience gets
the story relatively early, but even after a radical drug treatment brings hi
out of his stupor, Tiran still has a hole in his memory. Back in New York, he
takes up with Palestinian fashion designer Clara Khoury, but he's haunted by
what may be literal ghosts: The asylum where he recovered was built atop a
destroyed Palestinian village, and the residents massacred there are said to
communicate with the patients.
There's more than a little of Lars von Trier's The
Kingdom in that
premise, complete with Moshonov as the fey gatekeeper clinging to his hospital
berth so he can pass messages between the living and the dead. Aloni also
effectively evokes Atom Egoyan in his sweet, sad, surreal exploration of
memory, trauma, and collective complicity. But while his Egoyan-esque tone and
colorful visuals are striking, he belabors his complicated points about Israeli
guilt and Palestinian victimhood with heavy-handed symbolism, throwing in
overwrought dreams and some unnecessary flimflammery involving a fortuneteller
and a magical key. Moshonov's capering, wheedling, and stagey monologuing
become deeply taxing, and so does the conclusion, which makes more sense as
metaphor than narrative. Aloni's ideas are solid, but possibly too large and pointed
to cram within fragile human flesh.