Steven Spielberg
Munich

"MUNICH" by S.Spielberg

Anyone who thinks this is a political film, or about the Arab-Israeli conflict, or terrorism, or worse about anti-Semitism, or a spy story, has understood almost nothing, and in any case, is missing the best: let's say it would be like reading "The Name of the Rose" focusing only on the mystery aspect of the events, or watching "Schindler's List" concerned solely with Oskar's entrepreneurial fate; I hope that conveys the idea... In fact, this is a film about the father, the need to have one, and becoming one. Seen in this light, overall, the many sequences of bombs, blood, and intrigues are just dramatic interludes, although engaging and substantial, and narratively well varied, in a discourse that is, however, much deeper and richer in references to memory and, indeed, to the sense of fatherhood.

The protagonist is Avner Kaufmann (Eric Bana, convincing), a young Israeli, a sort of "primus inter pares" of a commando officially non-existent even for the Mossad (a stern Daniel Craig/Steve appears among others), tasked with killing the Palestinian perpetrators of "Black September" from the famous Munich Olympic Games blitz of 1972. He never had parents as we usually understand them: in one of the first dialogues with his wife (Ayelet Zurer), she reminds him that he was abandoned: "You were put in a kibbutz: Israel is your mother". In short, parents who give up having him as a son, so much so that concretely, the new state of Israel, with its institutions, ideals, and need for survival, acted as a father for him (well portrayed by Golda Meir/Lynn Cohen, a commanding virago over other men). But he is also "fatherless" as his entire generation is, the first after Auschwitz, hence the symbolic pivot of the entire film seems to me that dialogue in Athens with the Palestinian: Avner is a fatherless man defending his country as such, the other is a stateless person who knows that his will be conquered by his children, given that he himself is a father and had one in turn. The Jews are a fatherless people as survivors of the Holocaust (not yet so remote as it begins to appear today), the Palestinians are par excellence the exiled from their homeland.

In short, all coveted but regretted fatherhoods, violated and maimed, deficient, if not suppressed, and anyhow insufficient to found one's identity: one must demand a father even at the cost, it seems, of massacring others who have the same need, and an effective representation of this is also in the relationship with the two French informants: the "papa" prefers Avner to his own real son Louis; hence the fight for the father: it will be the latter who informs the protagonist's enemies, not the "papa" who instead, until the end of the film, reassures Avner of his own protection.

Both from the same root, the words "father" and "country" here I deliberately consider as one a metaphor for the other and vice versa, since both are for a man the root of himself, the origin in which to remain, even materially: "You have a country to fight for, this is why you European communists cannot understand our struggle," the Palestinian fighter tells him in Athens, obviously unaware of his true identity. Indeed, splendid that in that central dialogue the identity of the Palestinian is explicit, the Israeli's is not.

The detachment from father/country in Avner occurs when he realizes that his father can only demand death from him, and he notices when he doubts that the victims were not strictly linked to that attack, and that ultimately all the hatred arises in the Palestinians from claiming their right to a homeland, no matter how rocky and inhospitable.

How to escape from all this? In two ways: the first is intuited by the commando's explosives expert, Robert/Mathieu Kassovitz (the dialogue at the railway platform): he realizes that through the mutual domination and massacre of his people with the other, the Jews are drifting away from the founding value of their deep identity, which is God, "the" Father par excellence. To exit the logic of destruction and the endless cycle of blows and responses (the killed Palestinians are immediately replaced by others even fiercer, and these in turn hunt Avner and companions) means then returning to that Father/identity, even disregarding the geographical homeland, as the protagonist will later do. The second way is indeed Avner's: if identity is not obtained even by fulfilling the massacres demanded by the homeland, then one must become fathers: for him, who towards the end will move to New York, only the family will count from now on, i.e., he will be a father, and his identity will be of a father and husband, an identity legitimized by the logic of affection, not destruction. In the sequence where he recalls the massacre at Munich airport, precisely while making love with his wife, he impregnates her for the second time: precisely in the nightmare of those deaths (athletes and terrorists) that had generated his mission to kill, he regenerates the new land where he now lives, and together the new, real and symbolic land, which is his wife's womb (thus anything but a Spielbergian descent into sentimentalism, as has been authoritatively suggested!).

In the homeland that is no longer his, he will not return, since his children (and children of a certain father, undisputed by anyone!) create one in virgin land, which no longer has to endure the eternal feud of two brothers, who forgot they were brothers, and who cannot live together.

Only such a Jewish film (direction, screenplay, cast, setting) could talk about the "father" with such depth; only "The Believer" might surpass it in depth; perhaps we will return to it in the future.