Aleksandr Shabatayev: Jewish Vendetta (Nekama Yehudit, 1999) reviewed by Libbie Katsev © 2022 |
Revenge drama in form, family road-trip dramedy in content, Aleksandr Shabatayev’s Jewish Vendetta (1999) follows a father and son who travel from Israel to Crimea’s Bakhchisarai, the father’s hometown, for revenge on his old friend (see Surina 2021).
Jewish Vendetta begins as David (Liron Levo) is summoned to the bedside of his father, Nathan (Leonid Kanevsky). Nathan, ill with heart disease, uses the occasion of his—seemingly—final illness to press his wife, Yona (Levana Finkelstein), into admitting that thirty years ago, she had a brief affair with his best friend, Shurayev (Vsevolod Gavrilov). Yona confesses, apparently convinced by Nathan’s promise that “he’ll never get out of this bed again”—and Nathan immediately jumps out of bed, determined to kill Shurayev and restore his honor. Nathan remains largely untroubled by his heart for the remainder of the movie. Although his illness doesn’t deter him from several hikes and some near-death experiences, it leads David, who is unmotivated by Nathan’s invocation of family honor, to accompany his father on his quest for revenge. Nathan’s leap from his deathbed sets the tone for the rest of the film, which jumps from violent intentions to strangely weightless actions, with little concern for the characters’ hearts.
Once they get to Bakhchisarai, Nathan and David cross paths with Aleksandr Muradovich Karimov (Vladimir Nedashkоvsky), the businessman/politician who now runs the town. David also falls for a local woman, Lena (Natasha Shvets), who turns out to be Shurayev’s daughter. Their paths soon entangle even more: When David asks Lena to go for a walk, they are followed and assaulted by a group of local men, including Karimov’s son Murad (Iurii Grishchenko), whom Lena has spurned romantically. When his daughter’s assailants come to his house, apparently intending to finish what they started, Shurayev accidentally kills Murad, prompting Karimov to seek his own revenge against Shurayev. As Nathan hunts his former friend in their childhood haunts, David feeds information to Lena to keep her father on the move, and Karimov’s agents track them to find Shurayev.
While the plot has the tidy irony of both a good comedy and a tragedy, Shabatayev races to keep up with the twists and turns of his story, with unsatisfying results. The facts of the film are inconsistent (e.g. it is not clear why Karimov does not kill Shurayev during their confrontation straight after the discovery of Murad’s plight). The dialogue is frequently flat and didactic, the performances are rushed, and the essential tension of the film—David’s lack of interest in his father’s quest for revenge—is underexplored. David does not seem to take his father seriously, nor does he seem particularly interested in his father’s past. Beyond dramatic statements like, “You’re not my son if you don’t help me,” Nathan does not seem to take David’s disinterest all that personally, even when David tells his father to wait for him so he can woo Lena. At this point, David and Nathan appear to be in two separate movies. Father’s and son’s paths converge with the revelation that the man Nathan is trying to kill is the father of David’s love interest, but again, despite Nathan’s insistence that his son aid him in a murder, he does not confront David even when he learns that he has been helping Shurayev evade him.
David and Nathan’s disconnect reflects the deep disconnect in the film: what it tells us it is and what it actually does. The film concludes with Nathan saving Shurayev from Karimov and reconciling with Yona as he returns to her with the news of David’s upcoming wedding to Lena. The plot, beat-by-beat, is a subverted revenge drama, but Shabatayev commits to neither the subversion nor the drama. In an early scene, Nathan dreams of confronting Shurayev, who disdainfully inspects Nathan’s gun and then tosses it into the sea, telling him, “kill me if you want, but get a normal gun.” Nathan awakes, horrified. This moment, along with our first glimpse of Karimov in a seedy restaurant, partially obscured by a curtain and calling for champagne, lean wholeheartedly into the revenge narrative in order to find absurdity in the avengers’ foibles and failed plans. These are seeds of a film that work, but they are forgotten as Shabatayev shifts his focus to David’s romance with Lena.
David and Lena’s love story seems meant to redeem their fathers’ betrayals, but it suffers from a more general weakness of the film: its plot hinges on violence towards women, but Shabatayev races past the psychological impact of that violence. David sees his trip to his father’s hometown as an opportunity to womanize. As it would happen, the first woman he meets is Lena, who hitches a ride in their taxi. When he sees Lena in Bakhchisarai again, David convinces her to go for a walk with him. They are followed and cornered by three men led by Murad, who wants revenge because Lena spurned his advances. David, who speaks little Russian and is apparently unfamiliar with the universal language of three men approaching menacingly from different directions, is shocked when the men begin to beat him and attempt to rape Lena. After their escape, a subdued Lena evades her parents’ questions, but David is all smiles. He later climbs up her house wall and sneaks into her window with a bunch of flowers, while he fantasizes about marrying Lena in the same place where he was beaten and she was sexually assaulted. Because David is profoundly unaffected by her fear, his later romantic gestures—screaming her name from atop a statue of an eagle and staying to marry her—are unconvincing and a little creepy.
Where Shabatayev falters at telling a story through people, he is more effective at telling one with light and landscape. His experience as a cinematographer (he shot a number of films at the Tajikfilm studios in the USSR before leaving for Israel) is apparent in evocative moments, such as the headlights of Nathan’s returning car illuminating the bedroom where Yona sleeps, or Lena and David swaying toward each other as they sit in facing swings during golden hour. Shabatayev sets his Bakhchisarai scenes with eroding statues, empty stone buildings, snow-covered cemeteries, defining Crimea as a place of the nostalgic and distant past. The characters move through these landscapes with frustrating speed. Nathan, visiting his parents’ gravesite for the first time in decades, doesn’t even finish brushing the snow off their headstone before he moves on to the next grave and next plot point.
Nathan and David’s first stop in Bakhchisarai is the abandoned home where Nathan was born. Characteristically, it is a frustratingly brief and emotionally uneventful scene. Nathan doesn’t challenge David who derisively says that “it looks like the Gaza Strip.” The only direct comparison David makes between Crimea and the landscapes familiar to him, it is both disturbing and revealing, suggesting that Gaza is an empty relic and Crimea is a war zone. By never giving David—or Nathan—the time to interact with the setting as anything other than a backdrop to their goals of romance and revenge—not even the time to finish wiping snow off a grave—Shabatayev holds them separate from Crimea. The film suggests that Bakhchisarai exists on a previous temporal plane, one that Nathan and David cannot truly access, and that this is no loss. Even when David chooses to stay behind in Bakhchisarai, it is only temporary, with the intent of marrying Lena and bringing her, too, to Israel. Although Shabatayev lingers on the beauty in Crimea, it ultimately comes across as little more than a tourist destination.
Libbie Katsev
Works Cited
Surnina, Polina. 2021. “Aleksandr Shabatayev: ‘Kogda chelovek stoit na kraiu propasti, eto ochen’ interesno’”, Evreiskii zhurnal 18,
Jewish Vendetta, 1999, Israel/Ukraine
Color, 84 min
Director: Aleksandr Shabatayev
Script: Aleksandr Shabatayev, Semyon Vinokur
Cinematography: Avraham Abramov
Art Direction: Emanuel Amrami, Ilia Iovu, Aya Lobo, Shlomo Olgisser
Music: Vyacheslav Ganelin
Editing: Roza Lorman, Sonya Yeruslavski
Producers: Gadi Castel, Pavel Douvidzon, Riki Shelach Nissimoff, Marek Rozenbaum, Zvi Shapira
Cast: Leonid Kanevsky, Liron Levo, Levana Finkelstein, Vsevolod Gavrilov, Vladimir Nedashkоvsky, Natasha Shvets, Iurii Grishchenko
Aleksandr Shabatayev: Jewish Vendetta (Nekama Yehudit, 1999) reviewed by Libbie Katsev © 2022 |