“Is it…b’seder if I sit close to you?” Sasha breathes the come-on into Mendy’s ear—a Ukrainian prostitute in Tel Aviv’s red light district with a nervous Yeshiva bucher on her hands. Never fear, though—Mendy’s visit is glatt kosher, a prescription from his B’nai Brak rabbi, who caught him with a contraband copy of Siddhartha tucked inside his Talmud and decided desperate measures were in order. Granted, his rabbi expects a quick fix: Mendy will purge himself of desire and return ready for a life of Torah. But things don’t quite go as planned. Sasha turns out to be much more than b’seder, and Mendy, head over heels, abandons yeshiva, peyos, and family to pursue her to Jerusalem.
With a plot like this, you’d think “The Holy Land” would be about, well, holiness: communal obligation and the consequences of Mendy’s break with tradition. But neither the film nor its protagonist seems particularly concerned with the sacred. Mendy leaves yeshiva behind without a second glance, wrestling far less with his Judaism than with his lust for Sasha.
From masturbating over dirty magazines before kiddush to lap dances at the “Love Boat,” Mendy’s transition goes down remarkably smoothly. Hopelessly naïve, his parents take their son’s sudden urge to renew his religious sparks in Jerusalem at face value (“We’re so glad you can talk to us about your problems,” his father says). Once there, Mendy is hired as a bartender by Mike—an American one-time war photographer, regular of Sasha’s, and, a la Rick Blaine of “Casablanca,” owner of the hottest dive in town. “Mike’s Place” is frequented by Jews and Arabs alike, by American ex-pats and Russian prostitutes. Mendy drinks with a Palestinian smuggler named Razi and a fundamentalist Brooklynite known as the “Exterminator.” With a mutual appreciation for whiskey and Bob Dylan, and their guns stashed safely behind the bar, these residents of the holy land live in a happy dream—or at least a drunken haze.
Mendy’s own reverie is interrupted by his rabbi, who appears at the bar (requesting juice in a plastic cup) and accuses him of forsaking Emmet—truth with a capital T. But the rebbe is wrong: if anything trumps Mendy’s yen for Sasha, it is his yearning for the truth. When Sasha starts making love to him, he is horrified to discover that Mike has paid her in advance. She proposes a new fantasy, indulging his naiveté: “let’s pretend we kids at summer camp…in the pool…the counselors no see us,” she says, pressing against him. Mendy rejects that too.
Entranced, fixated on the ideal, Mendy agonizes desperately over whether Sasha truly loves him. He throws a furious tantrum when he discovers “Sasha” is not her “true” name. And he interrogates her endlessly, even as she bathes (“How long have you been here?” “Where do you live?” “Are you working tomorrow?”), until, exasperated, she plunges underwater to escape.
But there are a few kinds of truth in “The Holy Land”—Sasha simply has little use for the facts. Indeed, Mendy is the only lovesick lightweight at Mike’s Place, while the other characters settle for the truth of a fair exchange. Willing to be any fantasy on Mike’s dollar, Sasha is outraged when Mendy refuses to hold up his end of the bargain–”open pants and fuck me like man,” she barks. Mike, who tells Mendy he likes photography because “pictures don’t lie,” is intrigued by an Arab boy’s offer to throw stones at Israeli tanks for a few shekels–the perfect pose. A group outing to the desert gives Mendy a chance to trek alone with Sasha, but it also allows Mike to use Mendy as his drug courier. And Razi, happy to help Mike in a lucrative drug run, is in truth using all of them to carry out his own far more sinister scheme.
Gorlin’s use of these layered realities allows him to construct an original plot from a series of otherwise-clichéd elements (a naughty text hidden in a schoolbook, a world-weary prostitute, a bar where everybody knows your name). But he stumbles by depicting Sasha merely as the object of Mendy’s myopic gaze. Always impeccably dressed and glowing, she stands out in the cast like the sole movie star in a crowd of extras. Beyond this, the camera neglects her—like Mendy, the director adores her but never gets inside.
Gorlin does succeed, however, in using Sasha to unwrap another reality. She is the outsider who faces Israel’s daily grind, wanting nothing more than to leave the country in the dust. She reminds the viewer that our own perceptions of the “holy land,” constructed in ignorance of its ugly side, are as likely based in illusion as truth themselves.
And yet Gorlin’s film isn’t simply about reality shattering fantasy. As a mere five minutes in the “Love Boat” reveals, fantasy is a billion-dollar business, as real as anything that can be bought and sold. Mendy tells Sasha she has beautiful eyes; “I wear contact lenses,” she replies. But he is smitten all the same. Mendy finally leaves Sasha because he wants more truth than she can give, but ultimately, it is his own demand that truth be fantastical that drives him away. The climactic act that ends the film and shatters the illusion of harmony created at Mike’s Place, is itself in the service of a fantasy about what Israel should be. The fantasy of Sasha, the fantasy of religion, the fantasy of the “holy land” itself: all are as real as one believes they are. Truth, in this holy land, is what you make it—play along or take your chances on an Egged bus bound for home.
