Rita, the 76-year-old mother of director Ohad Milstein, is a total shopaholic. She has an abundance of clothing that drives her husband Avi (79) to distraction. There is not a room in the house that is not packed to the rafters with dresses, hats, shoes, bras, shorts, trainers or blouses, many of which have never been worn. The annual price tag for these adds up to something in the region of 250,000 shekels per year, when creams and cosmetics are also factored in.
Rita and Avi have long given up on communication (“if they were communicating at all, it was fights,” observes Ohad), although we sense that Avi could be willing to extend an olive branch. For Rita, however, all intimacy is gone. It has “passed with time.” For her, it is “extinct.”
The thing is, in photographs from over half a century ago Rita and Avi are happy and carefree, charming and beautiful. We see them lying on beaches, barely able to take their hands off each other, or (on film) stopping on a crowded street to kiss. Son Ohad clearly remembers them like this time from his childhood. In love, touching and embracing, his mother looking gorgeous, his dad very funny.
The current situation is therefore of grave concern to the director who has previously pointed his camera inwards to explore intimacies within the familial space, such as during his wife’s pregnancy when a twin foetus died in the womb and she and her husband had to decide whether to ignore medical advice and continue with the pregnancy (Week 23). Or when Ohad films his 6-year-old son Alva (who was eventually born healthy) as each night, before going to sleep, he articulates in whispers his personal fears and passions (Summer Night).
In examining how and why the spark in his parents’ marriage has become all but extinguished, Ohad therefore turns the gaze on his own marriage to his wife Rahel as both determine how far they are prepared to go to keep their own spark alive. The result is a brave, complex and highly revelatory film, one that is a compulsive, sometimes uncomfortable, watch.
I am not going to give away any spoilers, but needless to say the film is chockful of surprises in terms what folk are prepared to divulge (whether it be the younger or the older couple), and to what extent they are prepared to expose their inner psyches as they assess what is necessary to keep their marriage alive, vibrant and fun. “In the case of this film, I think that our curiosity about the truth is stronger than our fear of exposure,” says Ohad.
The director reasserts the existentialist dilemma(s) at the root of his film. “I was looking at their [his parents’] pictures when the relationship had just started, when they were young. They were in their twenties. They were in this 1970’s feeling when the hippies were in fashion. They were living a lot. And I was shocked. How can this starting point from 50 years ago turn into this current situation?…This brings me to the next question, and this is the biggest, fear of me as a person. How do I avoid the same drastic downhill slope of the relationship in my own personal life?”
He seeks answers to the latter question together with his wife Rahel, a citizen of Switzerland, where the film receives its world premiere. Together they discuss their needs, wishes and fears – and respond accordingly. “There was and still is a dimension of risk to this film and its release to the world,” Ohad writes. “The subject is very personal and sensitive. It’s not trivial for us as a couple to put ourselves on the screen like that. But along with this risk, a very strong bond was created between Rahel and myself. I feel that through the film we both learned about this power of a close-knit relationship that builds around a common life experience.”
Monogamia delivers a further, and unexpected, level of poignancy when, at one point, Rita refuses to takes part any more, and is therefore replaced by an actress (to husband Avi’s surprise and mild consternation). Such is the complexity of the home set-up that she enters, the actress is deeply affected as she improvises (emotionally and tearfully) using lines previously delivered by Rita in conversation with Ohad.
While Ohad doesn’t believe in the concept of documentary as therapy, the change that the process of observation and recording effects can be, at times, remarkable.
“I see filmmaking as a bridge, a highway for intimacy,” he stresses. “It’s really amazing. I am a true believer that when once you raise the camera – and the other person in front of you is of course allowing you to raise the camera, allowing you to film them and to make the conversation with them – the intimacy is so strong. This is magic. And once there is intimacy, I think everything is coming alive again. The feelings are out and the emotions are out, and the ability to discover the truth is available.”
Ohad didn’t set out to “fix” anything with his film, he underlines, “but I did want to understand what is the problem, and I do think that once the camera was there, the intimacy was so strong that this helps to solve the problem. Not all of the problems but some the problems.”
The film world-premieres 7 August in La Sala (11.00), with a second screening booked for PalaCinema 1 on 8 August at 09.00. After Locarno, Ohad is hopeful that the film will have a successful festival career ahead of local distribution in Israel. French and German broadcast will follow on Arte and RBB respectively.
