Guy Nattiv
Golda

Since, in the summer holiday spirit, the US market overwhelms us with light, sparkling films and superheroes in tights, I decided to embrace suffering in style and watch Golda (2023) on my home big screen. A dense, somber film starring the monumental Helen Mirren. After The Queen, where she gave body and dignity to the icy Elizabeth, we find her again in another position of power, less regal and more tragic: no crowns, no melancholic deceased princesses, just an elderly, ill woman, overwhelmed by the weight of history. Not a post-modern superheroine, but a human figure, the kind you rarely see in biopics.

Set during the brutal days of October 1973, with some flash-forwards to 1974, Golda is a powerful and claustrophobic portrait of a leader marked by a harsh past, forced to face a massive, coordinated attack from neighboring countries determined to wipe Israel off the map.

Helen Mirren delivers a minimalist yet tragic performance, giving voice (and silence) to a woman who had every right to wonder if her suffering would ever end. Yet, with a dry strength devoid of any sentimentality, she manages to keep a nation standing at the edge of the abyss.

The scenes in which Golda listens helplessly as young soldiers are slaughtered are exemplary. There’s only a hint at the torture, humiliation, and inhuman treatment inflicted by Syrians and Egyptians on Israeli prisoners, in blatant disregard of the Geneva Convention. A reality the film transmits starkly, without emphasis, like a scar on living flesh.

The film’s budget was cut during production, so the few images of the battlefields are archival footage. But this limitation turns into a stylistic choice: the whole film is a nightmare trapped indoors, dark, suffocating, shot with remarkable visual care and a use of symbolism that never lapses into rhetoric. The most devastating moment? Golda and her assistant (a restrained Camille Cottin) having to tell a secretary that her soldier son has died. No words. No heartstring-pulling soundtrack. Just looks, gestures, the unbearable weight of what must be said. Pure, surgical cinema, offering no consolation.

And then comes Leonard Cohen. Who by Fire, over the closing credits, is the final blade: sorrowful, prophetic, inexorable. Cohen – who really did go to sing for the soldiers in the desert – is the perfect voice to close a film made of gravity, memory, and judgment. The ending, even vaguely hopeful, leaves you shattered. Because we know, with cruel clarity, that that hope for peace, a truce, for humanity, has been broken.