They don’t think peace is possible

Last evening I watched the movie Crescendo, directed by Dror Zahavi. I saw it on the Detroit Film Theater newsletter. It was available through the DFT, though only for a limited time and I missed it. So a bit of online searching got me to the distributor’s website and I saw I could see it through Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theater, which will probably get a portion of the ticket sale.

Crescendo is a musical term and let’s get the annoyance out of the way. In music the word means to grow louder over a period of time. Alas, I’ve seen newspapers use the phrase “build to a crescendo,” implying the word refers to the peak volume, not the rise. To be correct newspapers should use the phrase “build to a fortissimo” or “crescendo to a fortissimo.” OK, rant over.

The tag for this movie is “Make Music Not War.” Famous conductor Eduard Sporck of Germany is convinced by and organization that advocates for peace to create a short-term youth peace orchestra equally made up of Israelis and Palestinians.

This movie is not a documentary. It is actors presenting a fictional story, though it is loosely based on Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. As with most movies of actors portraying musicians I look for how accurately an actor is playing the instrument being held. Sometimes it looked pretty good, most of the time not accurate at all. Which makes me think the few times it looked good it was a closeup on a real player’s hands, not the actor’s hands.

The movie opens with both Layla and Ron practicing the same violin piece. Layla is in the West Bank and must interrupt her playing because of tear gas floating in through the window. Ron is in Tel Aviv. He’s quite cocky. Then we see Layla and Omar (who plays clarinet) held up at an Israeli checkpoint. Then it is on to the auditions in Tel Aviv. Ron is upset that Layla is chosen as concertmaster over himself.

Lucky for the American viewers the common language is English. We get subtitles when dialogue is in Hebrew, Arabic, or German.

Layla, as concertmaster, tries to get a rehearsal started before Sporck arrives. This results in the first brawl among the young musicians. The organizers quickly see that holding rehearsals in Tel Aviv isn’t going to work, partly because of local antagonism and partly because of trying to get the Palestinians through the checkpoint every morning. So the backers transport all two dozen musicians to a villa in the Italian Alps (the youth seem confused whether they’re going to Austria or Italy, the credits say filming was done in Italy but the security team spoke German). The youth are all given the same outfit to wear. They object to “uniform” so these are “expressions of solidarity.”

There are rehearsals, though it seems Sporck must spend more time in exercises trying to get the youth to consider the other half of the orchestra might actually be human. During one episode the youth tell their stories. Layla tells about her great grandfather who is still alive. He was driven from his home when Israel came into being and still carries the house key in his pocket hoping to use it again. An Israeli youth tells about his family in the Holocaust, then just after Israel declare itself to be a country all of the surrounding Arab countries attacked. He lost family in that war.

Later I realized these passions run deep – both of them mentioned events that happened around 1948. Today both Israel and Palestine stoke those old grievances.

When Sporck first asks them whether they want peace, most of them don’t. They don’t think it’s possible. He reminds them he has seen healing between Germans and Jews. He had thought he’d never be allowed to visit Israel.

Omar falls in love with Shira, who is Israeli. She takes a selfie of the two of them in bed. It doesn’t end well. Even so, the youth do have some respect for each other by the end.