BEYOND THE FEAR (Maria Kravchenko, Herz Frank, Latvia/Russia/Israel). 80 minutes. Rating: NN
For more than a decade, veteran documentarian Herz Frank worked on a project about the relationship of Yigal Amir and Larisa Trembovler, an Israeli mother of four who left her husband for Amir. (The hook: when they met, Amir was serving a life sentence for the murder of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who’d dared to sign the Oslo Accord with Yassir Arafat.)
As Frank’s health faltered, the project was taken over by filmmaker Maria Kravchenko. The result, thanks to their differing visions – Frank sees the relationship as a symptom of Israel’s irreconcilable political and religious split, while Kravchenko wants to make a love story – is an incoherent mishmash of TV news broadcasts serving as exposition, Trembovler stating and restating her love for Amir, and scenes in which Amir calls their young son from prison to discuss Biblical parables about righteous causes and the “bad men” who stand in his way.
