Full disclosure: I have never, not even as a teenage girl, liked Yehuda Barkan staring at me from the cinema screens. I didn’t like the type of masculinity he displayed, and the humor of his films seemed crude and not funny to me. He only had two clever pranks that I remember well (both of which he didn’t humiliate anyone) – the time he called the Rama cinema in Ramat Gan, which was showing “The Sound of Music” (it aired the same week I saw the movie there) and asked to send a telegram to Julie Andrews, and the part with the train the invisible When I sat down to watch Alon Gor Aryeh and Ofer Naim’s documentary about the life and career of Yehuda Barkan, I hoped that it would offer a new point of view, that it would reveal to me some hidden corner that I had missed, but I found nothing of the sort in it.
“We will never part” – a sentence borrowed from “Stolen Father” – is presented to the viewers in the voice of Yehuda Barkan, apparently, who is telling us his life story the way one tells a chizbet by the campfire. The presumption is because the film was made after Barkan’s death from Corona in October 2020. The narration even alludes to things that happened after his death, such as a meeting between the daughter he never got to know (because her Brazilian mother returned to her homeland when she was still pregnant) and her brother. But in the spirit of Bracken’s thrillers, you won’t find the impostor’s name in the credits. At the same time, in the image channel, a sly collage of clips from his films simulates scenes from his life.
The narration was intended to give the film a personal dimension, as if it were another Yehuda Barkan film, but to my ears it sharpened the fact that the text is almost devoid of introspection. “We were naive and thought everything was possible”, as he (as if) says, is not a valid argument regarding the kinds of humiliations and objectifications of Barkan’s thrillers, which provoked criticism even when they were released in the 1980s and not only in retrospect. Judy Parr and Caroline Langford, who exposed boobs in the thrillers, tell the camera that they didn’t feel exploited, but no one talks about how the viewers felt.
The starting point of the film is that the film critics have never been inclined to show kindness – “they tried to bury me” as the narrator says – and therefore they and their ilk do not receive an opening here. Colleagues (Eli Tabor, Yigal Shilon, Ze’ev Varach, Nitza Shaul), friends (Shashi Keshet, Aryeh Moscona) and family members tell what a great person and talented actor he was (the clips from the movies do not support this), except for his excessive tendency to gamble. Ex-partners (Edna Lev) also say one or two less sympathetic things. But no one will talk about the contribution of “Lupo”, “Charlie and Half” and “Snooker Party” to the local culture (or lack of culture), and how Barkan’s cinematic character shaped the Israeli man’s self-concept. The interviewees talk about the films only in terms of success or failure at the box office (someone discards the term “borax film”), and this makes this cinematic portrait a rather superficial text. Those who liked Bracken’s films will surely find a nostalgic thrill here, but those who did not find them enjoyable, like me, will not discover treasures.
After about an hour, when we get to “Stolen Father 3”, a look behind the scenes of the production reveals an unpleasant picture of his attitude towards women on the set. During the “making of” filming of the film, Barkan tries to convince Irit Shelag to kiss him in front of the cameras, and she shrinks and avoids him and he continues to press (the director of the film, Ayelet Menachemi, prefers not to get into it). Then Ayelet Kurtz, the 24-year-old star of “Looking for a Husband on Four”, talks about the shame and embarrassment she felt during filming as the partner of 48-year-old Barkan. It turns out that these exposures are related to the beginning of Barkan’s downfall in the 1990s. Both films did not find an audience and he went into debt and turned to religion. And when Barkan put a cap on his head and added an A to his name, he went from sexual harassment to keeping touch. Agile editing of clips from his old films emphasizes the sharp contrast and seems to wonder about the sincerity of the new one. But it is not clear how he got from here to there.
The director of “We will never break up”, Alon Gur Aryeh, is known as the creator of the very funny films “The Closed Institution” and “The Mossad”. He wrote the script with Ofer Naim, who produced the film. Naim also produced Barkan’s last film, 2019’s “Love in Slicks,” and it seems he was too invested in it to make a substantial film about it.
“Yehuda Barkan – We will never part” will be broadcast on Monday, 12.12, at 21:15, on HOT8 and Yes Israel