The syntax of families

It’s easy to forget, from the vantage point of 53, how constant the issue of normality is when you’re 13 or 14. One psychologist I’ve heard reckons that the key universal refrain for teenagers is “Am I normal?” followed, (in my view) by “How do I fit in?”, “Do I want to fit in” and “What will it cost me?” I was thinking about these things yesterday watching the Israeli film Intimate Grammar, directed by Nir Bergman, which focuses on a teenage boy, Aharon and his struggle with these questions.

The film focuses on one family and their interactions, the bitter, abrasive mother, the hapless father and the two siblings, Aharon and his slightly older sister. The title, which I love, forces us to think about the grammar of relationships – of families. The three of us who saw the film together viewed the family differently – because of our own particular family grammar. For two of us, the mother was a pretty horrible experience, for the third, she was like her own mother and therefore interacting within the norms of behaviour. What are the rules in this Israeli family? How do people customarily display love, anger, the need for space?

The film begins in 1963 with black and white footage of Israel’s Independence Day. The larger political situation sits at the outer extremities of this film. It is referenced by characters and omnipresent only in the ways in which politics touches the lives of individuals; the Holocaust survivor’s appreciation of the importance of food, compulsory military service, active youth on kibbutzes. The immediacy of the film is based on its attention to the small neighbourhood where the family live. This small space is riddled with low-level conflict, and neighbourly abrasions. It’s shot in beautiful early 60’s colours like an old Polaroid. It’s claustrophobic in intention, we are squashed around the kitchen table enduring the squabbles, incipient tension and love that is part and parcel of this family. Like Koreada’s films (especially Still Walking), we are forced to be part of the painfulness and the lovely intimate moments that make up this family’s life.

The film is based on David Grossman’s novel. He was interviewed in the Paris Review about this and other novels and said, in relation to this:

I became a more friendly child in those years, more active socially, yet I remained introverted. In The Book of Intimate Grammar there is Aron, a secluded, lonely child, and his best friend Gideon, the all-Israeli boy, who goes out with girls, is in the Scouts, and wants to be a pilot. I modeled Gideon on a friend I had when I was sixteen—I even interviewed him. When the book came out, I sent a copy to him and anxiously awaited his reaction. He called me after some time and said, I liked it and, of course, I found myself. I am Aron. That was amazing to me. If I had heard him say that when I was sixteen, my entire life would have been different. My sense of solitude, of hopelessness, of being totally excommunicated—all this would have been different.

I love this quote. It really distils the experience of being an adolescent. That no one is as wretched as you, as uncool, as un-whatever it is that you have a yearning for. And, unbeknownst to you, everyone around you is feeling the same. Aharon (the Aron of Grossman’s quote) is small for his age. Bergman deals with this theme subtly in the film; it is a preoccupation but not one that we expect will dominate the boy’s life in quite the way it does. It made me remember a Maltese boy I taught in 1983. John was very short for his age. He was, in the parlance of my adolescence “a late developer”. John, a lively, intelligent boy who practised magic tricks on weekends, hung himself in a shed at the age of 17 and a half. I would’ve been about 24 or 25 then – a young teacher – I remember being really upset that he’d given no inkling that the height thing bothered him. It matters, that stuff about body image, about fitting in, about girls and being cool. So what Bergman gives us is a film about difference (newly emergent Israel, life in the cheek by jowl suburbs) and universality. It’s pretty classy.