Hot take: A Tramway in Jerusalem

‘A Tramway in Jerusalem’ is an episodic film sketching vignettes of conversations and encounters that function as little windows into the world of this mythic city. Tight close-ups serve to foreground the individuals instead of the historic sites, as if to gently remind us that the Jerusalem of today is in fact a modern city like any other, with the same babel of languages, religions, ethnicities and identities jostling for space. Themes of marital discord, filial love, women’s security and freedom, the ravages of war and matters of theology are touched upon lightly.

While the camerawork is suitably intimate—and the opportunity to create bokeh out of the lights beyond the tram doors is amply used—some of the scenes seem staged, especially the ones where poets, radio hosts and other thinkers declaim works of art in the tram as if no one can hear them. The acting is uneven, with some performing more naturalistically than others, but the soundtrack is used to gently underline the haunting reality behind these relatively mundane episodes.

Particular sequences do stand out, one with an overbearing Jewish mother badgering her son to get married whilst simultaneously proclaiming the virtues of solitude, another with a Catholic priest quoting from the Bible of the curse that is to befall all three religions of the holy city if they do not refrain from sin, yet another with a Palestinian performer rapping about freedom to a tramful of deaf ears.

The most affecting though, is when a wide-eyed father visiting Jerusalem for the first time quotes Flaubert: “I felt like it was a fortified city of mass graves”. Not much has changed, it seems. While humanity struggles and squabbles, “the Holy City disappeared behind a hill and all but vanished from sight.”

Genre: Drama

Language: Hebrew/Arabic/French/German/Yiddish/Italian Runtime: 1h 34min Year of release: 2018 Streaming Platform: N/A

Hot take is a series in which I offer my first impressions of films from India and around the world.