>>REVIEW
LIVE AND BECOME
STARRING Yael Abecassis, Roschdy Zem, Moshe Agazai and Roni Hadar
DIRECTED BY Radu Mihaileanu
Now playing
Uptown Screen
In North America, "identity" is usually seen as a mundane, adolescent quest for some kind of mythical kernel of something that is uniquely you. What a luxury to be able to regard identity as a kind of self-improvement, nothing more than the embodiment of western individuality in this society that teaches us that all people are equal at the same time we insist that each of us is special. But we are also told that identity is a sham – not inherent, but a construct of what society makes us.
It’s a luxury to pooh-pooh identity as a "mere" construct because in some situations, identity – whether constructed or not – is life-or-death. Such is the case during the Ethiopian famine of the ’80s. Thousands of refugees entered neighbouring countries like Sudan, often travelling for days on foot, only to find more hardship in the camps. For Jewish Ethiopians in a Muslim country, it was dangerous to reveal their heritage for fear of violence. For this reason, the Israeli government airlifted many Ethiopian Jews to Israel to begin a new life.
These are the circumstances surrounding the events in Va, Vis et Deviens (Live and Become), directed by Jewish Romanian ex-patriate Radu Mihaileanu, who now lives in France. A story about an African boy growing up in Israel would be fascinating on its own, but Mihaileanu puts another twist in it – the boy (played by Moshe Agazai, Mosche Abebe and Sirak M. Sabahat during various stages in his life) is born not a Jew, but a Christian.
His mother, seeing an opportunity for him, sends her son to Israel with a Jewish woman whose own son has recently died. The boy takes on the identity of the dead son, Solomon, and is renamed Shlomo in Jerusalem. Once there, Shlomo’s surrogate mother dies, and he is adopted by a couple of (white) French secular Jewish yuppies, who struggle alongside their adopted son, attempting to stand up for their belief in peace in an increasingly violent society.
Israel itself is a nation of many immigrants, but as an African, young Shlomo finds himself the target of racism, while at the same time he battles fears of being discovered as a Christian.
The pull between group identity (as a Jew, Shlomo finds safety, community and love) and individual identity causes him to act out at first, but keen to survive, Shlomo immerses himself in language (Hebrew and French) as well as Jewish texts and traditions. Like any other minority member trying to assimilate, he does more than a good job of fitting in.
This early development is slow, and the actors playing Shlomo are appealing, if you ignore the distracting soundtrack that unnecessarily leads you to feel pity, anger, sadness, etc. The rest of it – the camera work, the linear plot – is strictly conventional.
However, as the film progresses, the pace of the story picks up, glossing over Shlomo’s romance with a local girl, his time spent at a kibbutz, his education, his marriage, fatherhood... whew! It’s as if so much of the conflict and drama is over, we all need to rush to the end to find another. Details like the Gulf War and peace talks with Yasser Arafat are paraded by and forgotten, as if the adult realities of national identity aren’t worth exploring.
I wonder if a TV miniseries might have better served the story? At over two hours, I feel like only his childhood is done any justice. |
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