Uri Klein

"As for Assaf Dayan, the son of General Moshe Dayan, in the male lead, I suspect that his father could not only act, speak and think, but even see better." Thus declared John Simon, one of the most acerbic of film critics, in his short, lethal review of John Huston’s 1969 movie "A Walk with Love and Death." Based on a novel by Hans Koningsberger, the film tells the tragic tale of a pair of young lovers during the period of the Hundred Years War. Huston sought to hold up the past as a mirror to the present: specifically, the Vietnam War. To reach a young audience – the two protagonists were dramatized as hippies wandering through remote history – Huston cast two unknown actors with potent lineage: Dayan, whose father was a hero and a worldwide symbol in the wake of the Six-Day War, and Anjelica Huston, the director’s daughter, in her debut film role. (Simon, by the way, could also be brutal in regard to the physical attributes of actresses – Liza Minnelli once poured a bowl of spaghetti over his head because of something he wrote about her – and did not spare the young Huston, either. Her face, he wrote, evoked an exhausted antelope, while her voice was like a tennis racket whose strings had snapped and her figure was shapeless.)

"A Walk with Love and Death" was a box office flop and did not make Dayan a star in America. In Israel, however, his status had been established by his performance two years earlier in "He Walked Through the Fields" – Yosef Millo’s adaptation of the iconic novel and play of the same name by Moshe Shamir. The film was released in 1967, the year of the Six-Day War, though it is set in the period leading up to the War of Independence. Dayan, all of 22 at the time, played Uri Kahana, the Israeli symbol of the physically striking and morally upright sabra, who sacrifices his life on the altar of national loyalty.

Israel has not produced any movie stars. In the entire history of local cinema there has not been a single actor or actress whose name is enough to draw masses to movie theaters: not Haim Topol, not Yehoram Gaon, not Moshe Ivgy and not Alon Abutbul, not even Gila Almagor or, for that matter, Assi Dayan. (The names of Ze’ev Revach and Yehuda Barkan contributed significantly to the success of the films in which they starred, but this was always related to very specific works.) But even if Dayan is not a star in practice, he fits the theoretical criteria for the part and is indeed the only star to have emerged here. The stuff of which his image is made adds up to one of the most complex figures in the history of the country’s popular culture.
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Private and public

What, after all, is a star? Throughout most of cinematic history, that question has been answered in almost mystical terms. "A star is an actor who has something extra," someone once said, coining a definition that stuck for many years. The "something extra" referred to photogenic quality, that mysterious aura that makes us look at the face of a particular actor or actress, and not at others who may be just as talented. But stardom is a far more complex attribute. Being photogenic is certainly a necessary quality, and Dayan has always had it, but that in itself is not sufficient to create a star.

Stardom results from the conflation of several personae in particular contexts and relations. The first persona is the character the actor is playing; the second is formed from the aggregate of all the roles he has played; and the third is the one that is forged off-camera – we can call it the private/public persona, but it is no less concrete than most of the characters played by the actor or actress on the big screen.

Dayan possesses all three of these criteria. The list of roles he has played is one of the richest and most riveting in the history of the Israeli cinema. His most important roles are fused with each other, while constantly hovering above them is the private and public persona of the local figure named Assi Dayan. None of the three personae – the character he has played in each film, the cumulative persona generated by all those roles taken together, and his perceived image in the public consciousness – exists without the other two.

What emerges from all this – from "He Walked Through the Fields" to his more recent films, such as "Things Behind the Sun" and "My Father My Lord," and from the TV series "In Treatment" – is a human drama that is simultaneously one of the most private, and yet also the most representative of Israeli culture.

At the core of Dayan’s evolving and cumulative stardom are defiance and rebellion, but also disintegration and destruction – physical and symbolic alike. All of his screen performances must be gauged in terms of the two formative facts of his life and career: his being "the son of" and his seminal performance in "He Walked Through the Fields."

Each of his subsequent important roles constitutes, at one level, a discussion of the fusion between actual lineage and fictional character, which thereafter dissolves and quickly decays. Dayan came to "He Walked Through the Fields" as "the son of" and in the film played a heroic and romantic character who founds a dynasty both concrete and also symbolic. After the character’s death, his lover, Mika, a Holocaust survivor, gives birth to their son and names him after the dead father. Thus, the son of Uri Kahana – the fictional character played by the real-life son of Moshe Dayan – will in his turn become one of the soldiers who conquers the West Bank in the Six-Day War. Has Israeli cinema ever produced a more highly charged text than this?

That same year, Dayan also portrayed another heroic character, in Micha Shagrir’s "Scouting Patrol," about a group of elite fighters whose mission is to capture the commander of a fedayeen squad. In 1969, Dayan co-starred in "A Walk with Love and Death," which was demonstratively anti-pacifist; a year later he played the leading role – of an Israeli soldier taken captive by the Syrians – in a film by the veteran French director Denys de la Patelliere, "Death of a Jew."

Also that year, Dayan starred in his second most important non-Israeli film, "Promise at Dawn," in which the persona of the symbolic father that previously hovered in the background of most of his films is replaced by a mother figure. Made by American director Jules Dassin, who was driven into European exile by the McCarthy witch hunts, the film is based on the autobiographical novel of the same name by Romain Gary, which describes the author’s relations with his domineering actress mother. In the film, which also fared poorly at the box office, Dayan plays the adult Gary opposite the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, Dassin’s wife.

On February 10, 1970, Dayan was a passenger on a London-bound El Al plane that was hijacked by terrorists during a stopover in Munich. One person was killed in the incident and 11 wounded, one of them the veteran Israeli actress Hanna Meron. Seven years later, Dayan played the deputy of Yoni Netanyahu (the latter was portrayed by Yehoram Gaon) in Menahem Golan’s "Operation Thunderbolt," a dramatization of the Entebbe Operation of 1976, in which Israeli commandos rescued the passengers of an Air France plane hijacked to Uganda.

Political declaration

In 1984, Dayan had a supporting role as one of the Jewish prisoners in Uri Barbash’s "Beyond the Law" (literally called in Hebrew: "Behind Bars"). The film was a milestone in the development of Israeli political cinema, and Dayan’s appearance in it, even in a secondary role, was an important statement. (Is it merely a coincidence that Dayan plays a character named Assaf and that Arnon Zadok, in the leading role, portrays a character named Uri – the first name of both the film’s director and of the character that made Dayan a star?). A year later, Dayan appeared in his most significant role since "He Walked Through the Fields": in Eitan Green’s "Into the Night." Dayan played Giora Geter, owner of a Tel Aviv pub whose entire life – personal, family and professional – falls apart around him. He is suspended from the army because of a fiasco he was involved in during the first Lebanon war; he cheats on his wife; and also has problems with his parents. His mother, Ruth – and the fact that the film character bears the same name as Dayan’s real mother is surely no coincidence – has kicked out his non-Jewish father, Bernard. The mother is played by Orna Porat (herself a convert to Judaism) and the father by Yosef Millo, who forged Dayan’s stardom in "He Walked Through the Fields," the only film Millo ever directed. Structurally, the plot of "Into the Night" is like a coil that constantly unwinds as we watch, thrusting the protagonist into an ever-wider and symbolic circle until he breaks down in the last scene in wrenching sobs.

In addition to its purely cinematic qualities, the film’s importance lies in the fact that it sums up all of Dayan’s major roles until then, and foreshadows roles that follow. Thus, in 1991, again under Barbash’s direction, in "Real Time" (aka "The War After"), Dayan played an army officer who is accused of blundering and is thrust back into civilian life. In Amos Gitai’s 1995 movie, based on Yaakov Shabtai’s iconic novel, translated into English as "Past Continuous," Dayan is Caesar, an anguished Tel Aviv hedonist; in Joseph Cedar’s 2000 "Time of Favor," he is a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) rabbi who stokes his pupils’ messianic passions; and in the 2001 film "A Matter of Reputation," directed by Yoram Kislev (who produced many of the films Dayan directed), he portrays a once-successful film director who becomes an alcoholic. In Daniel Syrkin’s "Out of Sight" (2006), Dayan is an abusive father; in another film released that year, "Comrade" (literal Hebrew title: "Something Good Will Happen to You Soon"), directed by Eyal Shiray, Dayan plays an oddball whose belief in communism leads him into madness. In yet a third 2006 film, Yuval Shafferman’s "Things Behind the Sun," Dayan plays the disaffected, tormented father of a family whose own father is comatose, while the next year, in "My Father My Lord," he is again a Haredi: the father of a Jerusalem family that experiences a tragedy.

In addition to all these recent roles, he also starred in two films he himself directed in this period. In "Mr. Baum" he plays an importer of sunglasses who is informed that he has 92 minutes to live. In "The Gospel According to God" (2004) he plays God, who sends his son, Jesus (played by stand-up comic Gil Kopatsh) to redeem humanity.

Complementing these characters – all of which undergo breakdowns of varying intensity – is Dayan’s "embrace" of his own physical ruin. No other Israeli actor has shown the ravages of the human body as he did in "Mr. Baum" and "A Matter of Reputation." In fact, I cannot think of any actor, Israeli or otherwise, who has been so blunt in this regard.

Thus, in June 2008, when Dayan revealed his deteriorating body and general state of health in a Channel 10 item, this event – though manifestly exploitative, shocking and appalling – also merged with the memory of some of his recent film roles: Here is what happened to an Adonis of Israeli film, whose beauty came to symbolize the beauty of the state itself and the heroic and romantic national values that shaped it. "I am the state," Dayan declared around this time in an article in the daily Yedioth Ahronoth, which was also accompanied by a revealing photo. Its collapse is his collapse, its ruin is his ruin; he is the symbol of the dream that became a nightmarish reality.

A striking feature of Dayan’s later films is that even when his body goes to wrack and ruin his face retains its beauty – its open, clean, even pure quality. That quality was preeminent in his best-known role in recent years: as psychiatrist Reuven Dagan in "In Treatment," which premiered in 2005. This TV role encapsulated all the paradoxes that comprise Dayan’s cumulative persona. He played the person in control, the guiding hand, the symbolic father, although we, the viewers, knew that it would be more appropriate for him to play the patient rather than the therapist. But as the series progresses the character’s weaknesses, the cracks in his armor of restraint and tranquillity, are increasingly exposed; this, in many respects accounts for the power of the series.

The collection of characters and roles that make up Dayan’s stardom is enhanced by another facet of his career, one matched by few other stars: the fact that since 1973 he has also been a film director. Indeed, the list of films he has directed, in some of which he also played the lead, constitutes the fourth component of the mechanism that makes Dayan Israel’s only movie star. His work as director fuses with his work as an actor and constitutes a key element in the dialectic that shapes his oeuvre in terms of his biography, his symbolic image and himself as an artist.

Restraint and aggression

Dayan’s work as a director can be divided into three chapters. It begins with two aberrant efforts: "Crime on Delivery," a fascinating attempt to create an Israeli thriller; and "Saint Cohen" (called literally in Hebrew "A Feast for the Eyes"), a 1975 film that represented his attempt to enter the cinematic realm of lyrical allegory in which Israel’s national poet (played by Yosef Shiloah) goes to Metula, the country’s northernmost community, to kill himself there. "Saint Cohen" differs in character and style from Dayan’s later films, but its engagement with the death of an artist, together with the sense of frustration and rage that pulsate below the surface, connect it with Dayan’s trilogy: "Life According to Agfa" (1992), "An Electric Blanket Named Moshe" (1995) and, finally, "Mr. Baum." The restraint and resignation of the early work give way in later films to comic wildness and direct, sometimes even crude aggression.

In 1976, Dayan made "Halfon Hill Doesn’t Answer," one of the most beloved Israeli movies of all time, which I once described as the greatest surrealistic comedy in the country’s history of cinema. Dayan’s series of comedies has known both peaks (such as "Givat Halfon" and "The Hit," for which Dayan wrote the lyrics to "The Bimbo Song," a stroke of genius in the annals of local pop music), and low points, among them "King for a Day" (1982) and "The Good, the Bad, and the Not So Bad" (1987).

Still, how can one not like a movie like the 1981 effort, "Am Yisrael Hai" (meaning "the people of Israel lives") which, though admittedly crude and sloppy, tells the intriguing story of a right-wing Knesset member, who is an enthusiastic supporter of the idea of Greater Israel and suffers from impotence? In fact, its faults notwithstanding, this work also foreshadows the trilogy that was launched 11 years later and became one of the high points of Israeli cinema in the 1990s.

In the same way that a direct line can be drawn from "He Walked Through the Fields" to the later trilogy, a direct connection exists between Green’s "Into the Night" and the first film of that threesome: "Life According to Agfa" (1992). Like Green’s film, Dayan’s is also both a summary and a new beginning. Into the setting where the film unfolds in the course of one long night – a Tel Aviv pub called Barbie – he introduces all the component elements of Israeli society and culture, sets them at each other’s throats in a kind of theater of blood, and at the end shows us a new Tel Aviv day (shot in color, in contrast to the black and white footage of the rest of the movie). "Life According to Agfa" is not flawless – and that is something that can be said of all of Dayan’s films – but it is one of the essential formative elements of local cinema. Indeed, the history of that cinema can be divided into pre- and post-"Life According to Agfa."

Whether Dayan’s personal story is the story of this place, whether he is a private or representative symbol, central or marginal, concrete or imagined,the very fact that these questions can be asked about him makes him one of the most significant figures in the history of Israel’s cinema and of its contemporary culture. A figure whose every foray into the night raises the expectation that it will be followed by a new morning.