The trailer for "Ballad of the Weeping Spring" arouses curiosity by starting with an electric bass that echoes forth the opening notes of the Theme from Exodus. One of those musical coincidences, you wonder, or do they really plan to work the Theme from Exodus into a movie about something else entirely? The answer is that the movie itself never includes those bass notes, but it does include a great deal of pleasant ethnic music and the characters are almost all musicians (although sometimes the actors seem to be performing out of synch with the soundtrack). The music carries you painlessly through a melodramatic and somewhat predictable plot that revolves largely around lead actor Uri Gavriel and the only slightly less craggy-looking-- but deadly, as it turns out-- hills of rural Israel. Gavriel, who graduated from years of playing forbidding tough guys, knows which of his many facial wrinkles to twist for every scene. The plot has been compared to The Magnificent Seven-- but many other movies could have been invoked, even The Blues Brothers-- in that it consists of rounding up a dream team, partly veterans and partly new guys, to fulfill a mission. The quest takes us through a curiously antique Israel: although the male romantic lead seems to have come more or less out of the present-- he would rather program a synthesizer than play an oud-- the houses are all of stone and we never see a cell phone or a computer. Judging from the vehicles people drive and the transistor radio someone listens to, not to mention a tabletop film projector, we could be in the sixties although the film never announces it. Or it could just be a re-imagination of the present with certain things curiously missing-- like Arabs, apartment houses, TV, street signs, and Ashkenazic Orthodox Jews-- and with certain curious additions such as Sicilian-looking hats for almost all the men. Anyway, the film holds interest and there's never been another one quite like it.
5 Reviews
Loved the music and enjoyed the movie
Red-1253 August 2013
The Israeli film Balada le'aviv ha'bohe was shown in the United States with the title Ballad of the Weeping Spring (2012). It was written and directed by Benny Toraty.
In this unusual movie, the noted Israeli actor Uri Gavriel plays Jossef Tawila, a legendary musician whose career ended when he crashed his band's van. Two people were killed, and the band's singer--Jossef's wife--is paralyzed from the waist down. Tawila has given up music and chosen a life of sorrow and solitude. Years later, the son of one of the surviving band members appears, and asks Jossef to come to his father's bedside to play the Weeping Spring Symphony, a piece he and the dying man had composed, but never performed.
That's the basic plot outline. What follows is a road movie that pays overt homage to "The Magnificent Seven." Jossef and the young man travel through rural Israel, finding former band members and outstanding local musicians to form a group that is worthy of the music and the situation. Although we've seen this type of plot before, the film is unpredictable, because Jossef travels through a rural Israel that probably never existed, and certainly doesn't exist now. He encounters old friends, old enemies, and some very unusual people and situations. The plot works if you don't take it literally, but rather see it as a timeless fable.
In any event, in this movie the plot isn't the point. The point is the music. This was my first introduction to Mizrahi music. Mizrahi music is music brought to Israel by immigrants from Muslim lands. It sounds Arabic, but is sung in Hebrew. The original Mizrahi music uses traditional instruments. (Today, many Mizrahi bands use modern instruments. In the film, only traditional instruments are acceptable.)
The movie is worth watching for the music alone. It's not surprising that the film won Israeli Academy Awards for Best Original Music and Best Original Soundtrack. I thought that the combination of plot, setting, and music was very successful. It was an opening into an unknown world. Granted, that world doesn't really exist, but the music exists, and it's wonderful.
We saw this film at Rochester's Dryden Theatre, as part of the top-flight Rochester Jewish Film Festival. It will work on DVD, although it probably works better on the large screen. Find it and see it. You won't be disappointed.
In this unusual movie, the noted Israeli actor Uri Gavriel plays Jossef Tawila, a legendary musician whose career ended when he crashed his band's van. Two people were killed, and the band's singer--Jossef's wife--is paralyzed from the waist down. Tawila has given up music and chosen a life of sorrow and solitude. Years later, the son of one of the surviving band members appears, and asks Jossef to come to his father's bedside to play the Weeping Spring Symphony, a piece he and the dying man had composed, but never performed.
That's the basic plot outline. What follows is a road movie that pays overt homage to "The Magnificent Seven." Jossef and the young man travel through rural Israel, finding former band members and outstanding local musicians to form a group that is worthy of the music and the situation. Although we've seen this type of plot before, the film is unpredictable, because Jossef travels through a rural Israel that probably never existed, and certainly doesn't exist now. He encounters old friends, old enemies, and some very unusual people and situations. The plot works if you don't take it literally, but rather see it as a timeless fable.
In any event, in this movie the plot isn't the point. The point is the music. This was my first introduction to Mizrahi music. Mizrahi music is music brought to Israel by immigrants from Muslim lands. It sounds Arabic, but is sung in Hebrew. The original Mizrahi music uses traditional instruments. (Today, many Mizrahi bands use modern instruments. In the film, only traditional instruments are acceptable.)
The movie is worth watching for the music alone. It's not surprising that the film won Israeli Academy Awards for Best Original Music and Best Original Soundtrack. I thought that the combination of plot, setting, and music was very successful. It was an opening into an unknown world. Granted, that world doesn't really exist, but the music exists, and it's wonderful.
We saw this film at Rochester's Dryden Theatre, as part of the top-flight Rochester Jewish Film Festival. It will work on DVD, although it probably works better on the large screen. Find it and see it. You won't be disappointed.
Friendship
abcvision6 February 2013
Josef Tawila (Uri Gavriel) has fallen away into the valleys of his sorrows. A painful past event his crippled his life and he was floating aimlessly in his daily existence. Suddenly in walks the son of a friend whose dying wish is to listen to a ballad of their youth, the Ballad of the Weeping Spring. With zeal and new focus, Tawila works on bringing together musicians in order to bring a band together and make music one more time for his dying friend. Not as easy as it may seem as he is ridiculed on this Don Quitoxe journey. The movies themes are rediscovering dreams of the past, facing your demons, and discovering that the world around you is much brighter than you may think it is. I saw it as part of the Atlanta Jewish Film festival and feel in love with the cinematography and the portrayal of an old world view and the notion that friendship's honor is timeless.
A fairy tale in western style
rmanory23 August 2013
Warning: Spoilers
I liked "Balada L'Aviv Haboche", showing at the Israeli Film Festival in Melbourne. I am not comparing it to 'The magnificent seven' because there is no gunfight. But Benny Torati was definitely influenced by western movies, and despite the fact that the plot takes place in a (non-existent) Israeli countryside, it could take place even in Mexico, except that the music is Middle Eastern. This is a romantic fairy tale, about Yosef Tawillah, the man who never gets drunk, and who went to jail many years ago for killing his best friends in a car accident...Yosef goes about collecting a group of music players to play the Ballad to the Weeping Spring, a song composed long ago by him and his dying buddy Avram. The characters are fairy tale characters: love for music and friendship are the driving forces. People have no need for money, go around playing music for the love of music and to pay respects to their dying friend Avram...That's why I see it as a fairy tale. What is missing from the Western-style movie is the final duel scene, so here there is a concert instead. There is even a drinking contest between a girl and a bad macho guy, reminiscent of a similar scene in Indiana Jones. This is a 'feel-good' movie, a pleasurable pass time, incredible music and very good acting.
A marker is redeemed
jakob1313 June 2016
A dying man calls in his marker in the Benny Toraty's 2012 award winning 'Ballad of the Weeping Spring'.
In a way the film is remarkable since its focus is on Arab and Iranian Jews in Israel Israel. Furthermore, no Jew of European origin is part of the script, which makes the story even more unusual and surprising.
Toraty's intention was to make this film a description of the social glue that held the Arab and Iranian Jews in today's Israel as expressed through traditional Arab music. It is an expression of cultural ties that have resisted the 'Europeanization' of a large community of peoples from the Middle East and North Africa. It is an anchor to a culturally rich past that remains, on the whole, to Arab Jews, that evokes a spiritual if not sentimental or nostalgic recall of lands they lived in for centuries before emigrating, for the most part, to Israel after it creation. The film, in its own, way is saying the past matters.
The story line is straightforward. The dying of cancer Avram send his son Amran on a mission to seek out Yosef Tawila, who composed with him the Ballad of the Crying Spring, to fulfill his promise that he would play as he was dying.
Now, Tawila, a stubborn recluse, for 20 years, has never stopped wearing a hair shirt, atoning for breaking the popular Ensemble Tourqouise. He feels doubly guilty because he fell asleep at the wheel of the automobile that crashed. He blames him for the murder of two members of the Ensemble, as well as crippling from the waist down its singer Margaret.
It is through music that Tawila redeems himself. And he sets off on a quest with Amran to assemble an ensemble of eight musicians and a singer to honor his pledge to they dying Mufredi.
It is this noble quest that 'Ballad of the Weeping Spring' bears a very mild comparison to Akira Kurozawa's 'Seven Samurai' and John Landis' 'Magnificent Seven'; there ends the comparison, and we should not put weight behind the false analogy.
What should hold our fascination is the projection of stereotypes of Arab Jews, which subsist almost 70 years after the founding of Israel.
You can say they live in a version of Gershwin's 'Catfish Row'. They inhabit traditional dwellings that we normally associated with life in Arab medinas (quarters). Massive wooden doors and no windows that keep the outside world from life within houses.. Walls are unadorned and made of stone, and unadorned for the most part.
By dress , they are of the working class. They speak Hebrew, with a few words of Arabic, but not much. They are exotic and highly sexual. The bride Rifkah is a fearsome Amazon and an eater of men. Her brothers are beefy and brawny and project an image not only of strength as bouncers but muscles that could disrupt social order.
The inhabitants of this ghetto world are therefore dangerous, dishonest and deal in questionable practices, on the whole.
And they like arak and love music, Bruria, the cantina owner, with a low cut bodice and a red dress sings with boundless boldness as she dances. And the male dancer wiggles like an erect cobra as he hypnotically performs his gyration, much in the manner the Americans used to think of Blacks shucking and sliding, for example.
The way Tawila 'collects' his eight musicians and female singer has it twists and turns and mild frissons of danger and adventure.
Saying this, we become acquainted with the instruments that make up the 'orchestra': oud (mandolin), nay (flute) and violin, and one main percussion instrument riq (drum), as well as flute, as well as kamanjah (traditional violin), supplemented with another traditional violin and a cello. The singer has a wide range of voice, high and at times piercing, with an ability to trill.
More, a violinist has a tattoo of the famous singer and heartthrob of the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema, Farid al-Atrashe on his arm. An interesting detail that tells us of the attachment to Arab Jewish roots to the music of the lands yhey once lived in for centuries.
And for good measure, Torarty throws in an Arab or a Druze, a talented by token. It is this gesture as well that is a link to a common musical heritage shared by Arab and Jew alike.
Tawila honors his pledge to Avram in a cave that will serve as Mufradi's sepulcher, a recall of ancient burial grottoes and caves.
As the ballad is played, Avram smiles, listens and then succumbs to his cancer.
In the final scene, in single file, the ensemble in single file march in the dying embers of the day, heads help up and proud of have kept gage and traditionÂ…and to a future that might portend a new Ensemble Tourquoise, but we cannot say for sure.
Heart stirring, and at times funny, in spite of the finality of life, 'Ballad of the Weeping Spring' is not a death knell of Arab Jewish music. It is sung today among say Jews from Morocco, Algeria and Tunis, at concerts, marriages and other rites.
The film, despite oversimplified notions of Jews from the Arab world, tells us something of a world too easily dismissed even in Israel
In a way the film is remarkable since its focus is on Arab and Iranian Jews in Israel Israel. Furthermore, no Jew of European origin is part of the script, which makes the story even more unusual and surprising.
Toraty's intention was to make this film a description of the social glue that held the Arab and Iranian Jews in today's Israel as expressed through traditional Arab music. It is an expression of cultural ties that have resisted the 'Europeanization' of a large community of peoples from the Middle East and North Africa. It is an anchor to a culturally rich past that remains, on the whole, to Arab Jews, that evokes a spiritual if not sentimental or nostalgic recall of lands they lived in for centuries before emigrating, for the most part, to Israel after it creation. The film, in its own, way is saying the past matters.
The story line is straightforward. The dying of cancer Avram send his son Amran on a mission to seek out Yosef Tawila, who composed with him the Ballad of the Crying Spring, to fulfill his promise that he would play as he was dying.
Now, Tawila, a stubborn recluse, for 20 years, has never stopped wearing a hair shirt, atoning for breaking the popular Ensemble Tourqouise. He feels doubly guilty because he fell asleep at the wheel of the automobile that crashed. He blames him for the murder of two members of the Ensemble, as well as crippling from the waist down its singer Margaret.
It is through music that Tawila redeems himself. And he sets off on a quest with Amran to assemble an ensemble of eight musicians and a singer to honor his pledge to they dying Mufredi.
It is this noble quest that 'Ballad of the Weeping Spring' bears a very mild comparison to Akira Kurozawa's 'Seven Samurai' and John Landis' 'Magnificent Seven'; there ends the comparison, and we should not put weight behind the false analogy.
What should hold our fascination is the projection of stereotypes of Arab Jews, which subsist almost 70 years after the founding of Israel.
You can say they live in a version of Gershwin's 'Catfish Row'. They inhabit traditional dwellings that we normally associated with life in Arab medinas (quarters). Massive wooden doors and no windows that keep the outside world from life within houses.. Walls are unadorned and made of stone, and unadorned for the most part.
By dress , they are of the working class. They speak Hebrew, with a few words of Arabic, but not much. They are exotic and highly sexual. The bride Rifkah is a fearsome Amazon and an eater of men. Her brothers are beefy and brawny and project an image not only of strength as bouncers but muscles that could disrupt social order.
The inhabitants of this ghetto world are therefore dangerous, dishonest and deal in questionable practices, on the whole.
And they like arak and love music, Bruria, the cantina owner, with a low cut bodice and a red dress sings with boundless boldness as she dances. And the male dancer wiggles like an erect cobra as he hypnotically performs his gyration, much in the manner the Americans used to think of Blacks shucking and sliding, for example.
The way Tawila 'collects' his eight musicians and female singer has it twists and turns and mild frissons of danger and adventure.
Saying this, we become acquainted with the instruments that make up the 'orchestra': oud (mandolin), nay (flute) and violin, and one main percussion instrument riq (drum), as well as flute, as well as kamanjah (traditional violin), supplemented with another traditional violin and a cello. The singer has a wide range of voice, high and at times piercing, with an ability to trill.
More, a violinist has a tattoo of the famous singer and heartthrob of the Golden Age of Egyptian cinema, Farid al-Atrashe on his arm. An interesting detail that tells us of the attachment to Arab Jewish roots to the music of the lands yhey once lived in for centuries.
And for good measure, Torarty throws in an Arab or a Druze, a talented by token. It is this gesture as well that is a link to a common musical heritage shared by Arab and Jew alike.
Tawila honors his pledge to Avram in a cave that will serve as Mufradi's sepulcher, a recall of ancient burial grottoes and caves.
As the ballad is played, Avram smiles, listens and then succumbs to his cancer.
In the final scene, in single file, the ensemble in single file march in the dying embers of the day, heads help up and proud of have kept gage and traditionÂ…and to a future that might portend a new Ensemble Tourquoise, but we cannot say for sure.
Heart stirring, and at times funny, in spite of the finality of life, 'Ballad of the Weeping Spring' is not a death knell of Arab Jewish music. It is sung today among say Jews from Morocco, Algeria and Tunis, at concerts, marriages and other rites.
The film, despite oversimplified notions of Jews from the Arab world, tells us something of a world too easily dismissed even in Israel
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