Berlin review: Helen Mirren in Guy Nattiv’s “Golda”

War comes to Guy Nattiv Gouda cheese, on screen and off. But despite media efforts to turn the casting of British non-Jewish actress Helen Mirren as Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir into an explosive example of cultural appropriation, both Nattiv’s direction and Mirren’s performance are understated and cautious enough to avoid the controversy. resist. In retrospect, it seems a little strange that no other candidate was deemed suitable, and the film won’t bring much additional business due to Mirren’s star power, but those expecting a non-musical disaster will be sorely disappointed.

Gouda cheese Much exists in the slipstream of two biopics of the past decade, The Iron Lady And darkest hour, both humanizing studies of seemingly indomitable famous politicians. Nattiv, however, takes a much narrower view of his subject and uses Meir’s testimony during an investigation into her government’s handling of the 1973 Yom Kippur War as the backdrop for a compelling, if rather dry, docudrama. This is the kind of project Mirren seems drawn to (Gouda cheese very similar in spirit to 2015 eye in the skya high-quality moral maze film about the ethics of modern warfare), while Nattiv’s understated direction (lots of earth tones and nondescript office furniture) recalls Tomas Alfredson’s understated adaptation of John Le Carrés Craft tailor soldier spy.

Le Carré’s shadow looms large, which may be due to Nicholas Martin’s thoughtful script. In a flashback, the drama opens with plenty of British espionage, in which an undercover policeman working at a school in East Finchley (“The Postmistress”) shares information about the movement of dangerous radioactive material with another (“The Baker”). Split part. There is talk of imminent military action in the Middle East designed to unite Egypt and Syria in a two-pronged attack on the State of Israel, literally and figuratively (“trouble with the neighbors”). But when Meir finds out, her advisers dismiss rumors that an attack could happen within 24 hours, indicating a serious lack of evidence from her surveillance unit. They were soon proven wrong, and the driving force behind this thin drama is Meir’s inner conflict: like Winston Churchill in darkest hourShe is a vulnerable and divisive political figure forced into war on her hindquarters.

Mirren Meir smokes a lot – even between treatments for lymphoma, the disease that killed her in 1978 at the age of 80 – and in those moments of quiet reflection, even in close-up, Mirren disappears completely under the prosthesis. Although she is actually older than Meir in 1973, Mirren has always struggled to impress, especially in age-appropriate roles The duke, in which she played Jim Broadbent’s old-fashioned Charlady wife. Here, however, she fits the character almost perfectly; Meir has been compared to Margaret Thatcher since her death, but Mirren highlights one key difference between the two: Whereas Thatcher was a confident, controlling figure who preferred the company of men (and trusted them to the point where their loyalty was overestimated) . ) Meir is portrayed as a team player, surrounded by men whom she needs to support her but whose inadequacy annoys her. Some of her more emotional moments can be rosy, especially in scenes where she reflects on the human cost of war, but it can hardly be described as glossing over it.

Key figures from Israel’s past and future political history come and go, notably Moshe Dayan, Ariel Sharon and Henry Kissinger (in a cameo by Liev Schreiber), but Nattiv keeps things manageable for everyone. Most viewers come from Europe and the US. The fight scenes are similarly muted, mostly conveyed by video monitors, phone lines and archive footage, a well-intentioned strategy that unfortunately pushes the limits of film budgets. But Gouda cheese makes some notable philosophical points that elevate it somewhat above your average show-and-tell TV movie. “All political careers end in failure,” says Meir, who knows the end is coming, and besides reflecting a more existential sense of struggle than the current one, she tells her assistant she will not taken alive.

In this way, Gouda cheese opens an interesting conversation about Meir’s legacy, despite Israel’s apparent victory when the Yom Kippur War ended with a death toll in the thousands less than two weeks later. “It’s easy to know when you’ve lost,” she says. “It’s hard to know when you’ve won.”