Ahed’s Knee

Directed by Nadav Lapid

Running time: 1hr49 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Avshalom Pollak stars in Ahed’s Knee

Israeli director Nadav Lapid does not make polite films: they spit and snarl and get way up in your face, brashly and constantly switching tack to disrupt your viewing pleasure, even if that means interrupting their own train of thought. His last, brilliant film Synonyms — never released in the UK, despite winning the top prize at Berlin in 2019 — was aptly titled, brimming and overwhelmed with ways to express itself. His exhilarating, abrasive follow-up Ahed’s Knee, which just premiered in Competition at Cannes, is perhaps more decisive in that respect, if no less chaotic. It knows its voice, and projects it at full rebel-yell volume, incensed with rage, decrying a cultural and political censoriousness and patriarchal violence. Like its nameless filmmaker protagonist — clearly an unflattering alter ego for Lapid, played with unhinged volatility by choreographer Avshalom Pollak — the film is hard to be around, and impossible to look away from.

We accompany the filmmaker, named simply Y, on a trip to a tiny village in the Arava desert, where he’s been invited to present his latest work, and perform a standard post-screening Q&A. There he’s welcomed by Yahalom (Nur Fibak), a young, agreeable deputy director for the Ministry of Culture who, as she confides to Y, has her own reservations about the administration she works for. But Y doesn’t do agreeability or agreement, and over the course of this minor professional engagement, Ahed’s Knee constructs a veritable assault course of hot political rhetoric, alternating hard truths with untruths, and expanding its timeline to zoom in on potentially unreliable memories of Y’s military service. Lapid directs with fevered, broken-off visual language to match the erratic fury of Y’s speech, the camera bobbing and weaving as if set off its very axis by passion. Editor Nili Feller — taking over from Lapid’s late mother, who cut his previous films, and is plainly mourned through Y’s own uncharacteristically tender missives to his mum — fires off hard cuts like gunshots, synchronised to the filmmaker’s anger, and the filmmaker-within-a-filmmaker’s anger. In Ahed’s Knee, it’s all of a piece, and in a million pieces at once.

AHED’S KNEE (HA’BERECH) (2021) Written by Nadav Lapid | Shot by Shai Goldman | Edited by Nili Feller

Selected for the Competition at the 74th Cannes Film Festival