The Jerusalem tramway (more commonly called the "light rail") is the setting for a series of vignettes, songs, and even literary readings. One passenger reads at length from Flaubert to his son, another from Trotsky to his friends. The end credits name several other authors as "inspiration"-- Sayed Kashua, Hanoch Levin... I didn't catch them all, but I suppose they're the sources of some of the scenes and monologues. Maybe none of the material is completely original? I don't know. Regarding the tramway itself, you will learn very little from the movie, which doesn't even begin with the expected establishing shot. Toward the end, any logical relation between the tramway and the content is discarded as a woman simply recites a poem in German to the camera. The people are all photographed very nicely; Jerusalem itself is sometimes clear and picturesque and sometimes goes by in a blur. The international audience may or may not understand that the tramway passes both through Jewish neighborhoods and through Arab neighborhoods, but the movie makes a point of presenting Arab grievances dramatically while the Jewish side of the conflict is presented only satirically. The presentation of the Jewish religious sector is perhaps the weakest element in the movie; the moviemakers go for the low-hanging fruit, presenting a religious song that is extremely well known anyway and a Talmudic passage that is also extremely well known anyway. The movie invites comparison with Gitai's 2013 film Ana Arabia, in which a reporter circulates through a Jaffa neighborhood interviewing people one after another-- except that in this case there is no connecting character. It would be tempting to say aha, the connecting character is the tramway. But other than a possible gnomic significance in the announcement of the stations along the way, there's no reason that this anthology of mini-performances-- some more engrossing, some less engrossing, but certainly none overlong-- takes place in a tram rather than in a café or in a bowling alley.
Review of A Tramway in Jerusalem
