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‘Shikun’ Review: Amos Gitai Channels Ionesco’s ‘Rhinoceros’ in His Scattered Critique of Israel
Drawing inspiration from the Theater of the Absurd, Amos Gitai's latest criticism 'Shikun' ends up too literal to be engaging.
Bound by the French-language narration of Irène Jacob — a one-woman Greek chorus and de-facto liaison between sides of the fourth wall — the film embodies the struggle to reconcile learned anger with calls for peace, and it takes several steps to the left of the distant, “kumbaya” observationalism of some of Gitai’s previous work (like “Tramway in Jerusalem”). There’s remarkable coordination involved (one of these shots lasts about 20 minutes, nearly a quarter of the movie’s runtime), and the score by Alexsey Kochetkov and Louis Sclavis often verges on hypnotic, but little by way of the film’s visual expression helps its political musings transcend the clunkily literal, despite its attempts at abstraction. It makes numerous fleeting references to caged peoples nearby, and it floats the same lingering questions Gitai broached in his documentary short “Letter to a Friend in Gaza” (some characters in “Shikun” all but quote the Haaretz piece that inspired it, “’I Was Just Following Orders’: What Will You Tell Your Children?”).
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