Amos Guttman | חימו מלך ירושלים (Himmo Melech Yerushalaim) (Himmo, King of Jerusalem) / 1987

taboo love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yoram Kaniuk and Edna Mazia (screenplay, based on Kaniuk’s Himmo King of Jerusalem), Amos Guttman (director) חימו מלך ירושלים (Himmo Melech Yerushalaim) (Himmo, King of Jerusalem) / 1987

 

When Amos Guttman’s cinematic version of the beloved Israeli fiction Himmo King of Jerusalem was released in 1987, it was not treated at well by his county’s critics or audiences. Critic Gidi Orsher dismissed the film as being “pretentious,” and went even further in describing it as a “strain on the Israeli film industry. Nachman Ingber described it as a ““miserable, tiring, heavy, a boring and slow film in which nothing happens.” And Meir Schnitzer criticized the film for its “lack of plot” and “visual ugliness.” The film sold only 21,000 tickets in the theaters. Because of his previously gay, outsider works, Guttman had clearly made enemies, who were not about to praise the work of a gay man when it came to major issues of Israeli history and patriotism, particularly the revered subject of the 1948 Siege of Jerusalem when, despite the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan which signified Jerusalem as a corpus separatum (a separate body) to be administered by an international board of leaders, it became a battleground (among others) by Jewish and Arab militias in Mandatory Palestine, with later other Israeli and Transjordan forces joining in the fight.

    As Amir Kamier has reminded us in his excellent summary of Guttman’s films, the director held no myths about the 1948 siege. As Guttman himself commented, “I wasn’t interested in what things were actually like back then. In Himmo, I didn’t feel like I was hitting some kind of national nerve. For work purposes, I dropped the ‘the’ people always put before the year.” Guttman even altered the ending, the siege simply ending and the soldiers leaving the makeshift monastery hospital, the movie ending with the daughter of the monastery’s caretaker, a mute, wandering down the empty halls dressed in a patient’s operating gown, holding her own amputee doll, as Kamier describes it, “Guttman’s ironic way of saying that life has indeed resumed.

     The film did receive positive attention, however, from international critics and won prizes at the 1988 Toronto International Film Festival and the San Francisco International Film Festival, as well as being well-received in other such festival showings. But even in this country, Bernice Reynaud, writing in the Chicago Reader pontificated in what was otherwise basically a plot summary, “I do not share the admiration expressed by some of my colleagues (such as the London Times‘s David Robinson) for the film, being quite irritated by its heavy melodramatic aspects, Alona Kimhi’s performance as Hamutal, and the droning chords that gloomily punctuate the action.”

     If one can generalize that 1987 was certainly not an innovative year at the movies, for anyone to dismiss this film as being disinteresting because of its lack of plot decades after the major works of Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, and just after the films Rainer Werner Fassbinder, so say nothing Warhol and numerous other outsider works and in the same year when filmmakers such as Pedro Almadóvar, Bruce Robinson, and Sergei Paradjanov released new works, suggests that either critics such as Schnitzer were either terrible ignorant of film history or were purposeful seeking for reasons to dismiss Guttman’s film.

     The film’s failure sadly led Guttman to cease filmmaking for some period after, until an outcry for his return to scene led him to make his last greatest work Amazing Grace. But, in fact, watching Himmo, King of Jerusalem I was not only moved by the film, but stunned by its beauty and arresting thematics.

      Certainly this film was different from all those that had come before it, when Guttman seemed content to mostly focus on outsider gay issues or in the case of Bar 51, the even more outré subject of incest. I suspect Israeli critics simply felt that they didn’t even have to truly deal with him as long as he kept to such subjects. But here he was entering of sacred ground, on more normative, particularly heterosexual and nationalist territory without necessarily bowing down with the deep respect they felt it deserved.

      Yet the book itself had always been oddly focused. The story is actually quite simple. A new nurse, Hamutal Horowitz, who has just lost her boyfriend in battle, arrives at the monastery where authorities have gathered soldiers too wounded to return to the front. Without proper supplies or even enough anesthesia, along with few rations, the survivors have been gathered here to basically suffer, some of them to die.

      Unlike the other nurses, seasoned cynics and none of them very good looking, Hamutal is an almost angelic beauty, who quickly develops a personable relationship with the men in the ward to which she has been assigned, even agreeing, despite the disdain of her fellow nurses, to return after hours to play cards with the men.

 

     The men under her watch include, among others, Yoram (Icho Avital), Aaron (Shy Capon), Frangi (Amiram Gabriel), and Assa (Dov Navon), who have themselves, as soldiers, prisoners, and isolated men have often been forced to do, made close relationships with other males. In this case Frangi and Assa clearly have a kind of “homo-social” relationship in which Assa sits most of the time in Frangi’s bed and even at night laying close to him on his own cot, asks when he might sleep in his bed. Indeed, when Hamutal first arrives, they have taken over the head doctor’s desk, with Frangi, feet up on the desk greets her, Assa’s head suddenly appearing from below the desk as if he were providing the solder with a blow job. Actually he is engaged in an almost just as intimate act, drawing pictures, as if tattooing, on Frangi’s leg cast.

      Another couple nearby seem to have also developed a similarly “close” relationship, as they knit in their beds next to one another.

     Although, we these may not be sexual kinships—in fact, at one point later in the film, someone describes Assa as a eunuch, presumably from his war injuries—they have joined into homo-social units that certainly resemble gay couples.   

    Yet for most of the men, the sudden appearance of Hamutal awakens their remaining heterosexual desires, even if she is clearly untouchable to them, even after she moves in with them, or one should say particularly when she begins to sleep in the same room. The only one who does appreciate the new female in their midst is Assa, who may truly be gay and, in event, is now totally devoted to Frangi, which his question, "Are we in love with her?" reveals [emphasis mine].

      If the doctor (Yossi Graber) had not made it clear how unbearable things are in this makeshift clinic, which often seems more like an insane ward than a military hospital. And when she hears the screams of a patient from a floor above who is being operated on, it becomes even worse. As the soldiers claim, the doctor is attempting to keep a dead man alive.

      The suffering patient is Himmo Perach (Ofer Shikartsi), a former close friend of Frangi’s. When Hamutal is finally sent to look after him one night, she observes the reason for his suffering. The man is blind, and one arm and both his legs have been amputated (without sufficient anesthesia). And when they bring him to the ward in which the soldiers I have described are sleeping, he refuses to speak, only crying out continuously in the night “Shoot me, shoot me,” a desperate plea that someone might finish him off.

      It is Frangi, his former best friend who tells the nurse the others how in his day, Himmo truly was the “king of Jerusalem,” a male beauty with whom all the women fell in love. Three times in this film Frangi recounts his and Himmo’s close relationship, making in clear to us that Frangi was also in love with him.

     Despite her original horror of even looking at his body, Hamutal quite quickly also falls in love with the almost bodiless man. She sits at his bedside for long hours, except when his brother Marcos (Amos Lavi) comes to visit for short periods, which is nearly every day.

     In her new devotion to Himmo, however, the nurse begins to provide the other men only with the same kind of mediated attention that they have received from the previous nurses. They have lost their female icon even as, to protect him, she moves into the room, placing her palette on the floor next to Himmo’s bed. And with their loss of her, their constantly interrupted sleep, and even worse, the feeling that they can longer in their wounds claim special status, they rebel, insisting that they will return to the ward until either Himmo leaves or she can quiet him.

     Her presence, in fact, does calm and quiet the almost dead man. And Frangi now perceives her as being even more of an angel, but even more out of reach. Other soldiers in the ward taunt her by insisting that she should marry Himmo, actually creating a kind of Huppah (the traditional Jewish wedding canopy out of their crutches over which they have placed a bedspread.

 

      She leaves in anger but is ultimately even willing to go through with that if they leave Himmo be. Frangi puts a stop to their nonsense.

       Finally, a Jewish State is declared, and Jerusalem freed. Food, supplies, and even champagne arrive, which the soldiers, rather than drinking, pour in celebration over their heads. The doctor and his staff plan a celebratory party which only Frangi refuses to attend. But Assa, who has joined the party, is still disruptive as he tires of their everyday dance music, demanding that they play Bach. He takes up a rifle to challenge the heteronormative control, but, despite his anger particularly of Hamutal for seemingly pulling Frangi even temporarily away from him, allows her to disarm him.

      Realizing that without her attentions, Himmo will simply to left to die, the beautiful nurse once more attends to her charge, giving a shot that will provide him with what he has been seeking, a way out of the pain and suffering of his life. And in finally permitting him to die, the nurse has finally herself chosen life over death. 

      The sad departure of the soldiers, wherein finally even the tentative homo-social relationships they have made but finally be abandoned, brought tears to my eyes. These men, as Yardenne Greenspan observes, writing about the book upon which the movie is based, commenting on both the various shifts in gender relationships and their own fears and realizations about their returns:

 

“The book also interrogates the gender dynamic between the lonely, agitated, and masculine soldiers, searching for bits of their male pride as they tease and leer at a young woman in a white nurse’s uniform. She embodies the quintessential fantasy of compassionate, merciful, tender femininity, while also being on the other side of an invisible wall—the wall of the unblemished; of those who will proceed to the post-war world without a handicap, in a world still too young and ignorant to have a decent understanding of disability or PTSD.

     … And it is through this lens more than any other that the hospital patients see Himmo. As he lies nearly motionless for days on end, his body refusing to die, never speaking save for an incessant crying of “Shoot me…shoot me…,” he serves as a frightening mirror of their own shattered hopes and dreams. As they joke about him and torment him, taking miniscule comfort in being the stronger ones, the ones who will come out alive, they shiver inwardly, battling against the small voice inside of them, telling them that though they may survive this war, the young state will not revere them as heroes but will soon forget about them, turning its attention to the able-bodied, the beautiful, the next generation of men sent to shatter their bodies and futures in the name of nationhood.”  

 

     Frangi hugs Assa, the latter perhaps facing in 1948 even a more difficult time finding someone with whom he can move on with in his future life. But Frangi too will miss the man who drew flowers upon his leg, and kept him warm in the long, terrifying nights.

     Hamutal watches from parapet high above, realizing finally that she has escaped from harm’s way when so many others have not. She is blessed, still beautiful, full bodied, and able to move on, but with a new world of empathy and comprehension about life and death that she can bring to the new nation.

     There has been nothing pretentious or ugly about this work; and for those who dare to listen to what its characters have to say, there is most clearly a deep narrative that expresses their fears and loves. The musical score by Ilan Virtzberg, moreover, is utterly haunting.

     The more of Guttman’s work I see, the more I admire his filmmaking.

 

Los Angeles, September 15, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).