Dror Shaul paints Sweet Mud in the soft golden hues that filmmakers typically use to denote cherished memories. His choice of palette is bitterly ironic, however, for this semi-autobiographical look back at a pivotal year in a young boy’s life is anything but a feel-good reverie.
The drama centers on a 12-year-old named Dvir and his widowed and seriously disturbed mother Miri, circa 1974. The setting is a kibbutz, the epitome of Israeli ideals and egalitarianism, which makes this story of selfishness and betrayal all that much more painful.
Sweet Mud is, at its core, a coming-of-age parable. It crystallizes that moment in everyone’s life when we realize that our parents are fallible — or at least not omnipotent — and it’s going to be up to us to carve our own successful path in life.
The film effortlessly engages the viewer by providing two vulnerable people to root for. But by portraying nearly every adult character negatively, Shaul stacks the deck to make Dvir’s ordeal even more acute. Whatever larger themes the director wanted to broach — say, the beginning of Israel’s slide from moral paragon in thrall to David Ben Gurion’s vision to an opportunistic, materialistic people like any other — they’re overshadowed by what ultimately comes off as a personal, long-held desire for payback.
Sweet Mud, which won the Israeli Academy Award for Best Film and picked up the Grand Jury Prize in the world cinema category at Sundance in 2007, screens in the Seattle Jewish Film Festival on Sat., April 5.
There is one bright spot in Dvir and Miri’s lives, and that is the arrival of her Swiss judo-champ boyfriend Stephan. The sequences with the boyfriend fully warrant nostalgic shades of amber, but his stay lasts only long enough to throw the narrow-mindedness and claustrophobia of kibbutz life into sharper relief.
Dvir’s efforts to help his mother lead a normal existence (with no help from his older brother) and to obtain something resembling support and guidance from her, are frustrated by the then-common practice of raising the children together instead of with their parents. So his opportunities to establish some kind of continuity with Miri are sadly limited.
The 270 kibbutzim in existence today, with a combined population of around 130,000, have begun abandoning that child-rearing model. If we take this film as our guide, it comes too late for several decades of needlessly unhappy children.
But Sweet Mud doesn’t play like a social-issue or “message” movie. It is too narrow in its focus and too underpopulated (except for a key dining room scene) to be anything but a harrowing chronicle of a rough patch of adolescence.
And yet the film is shot through with shards of light — a girl’s friendship, the joy of riding a bike or flying a kite, a (rare) kind word from a brother — and the very last image of the film might itself be construed as optimistic.
Optimistic, but not entirely cathartic. Dror Shaul wants us to leave with some “Mud” on our shoes.
Feeling anything but good
