Little traitor

Every nation's film industry is entitled to a nationalist phase. It would usually arise soon after the land's most recent revolution or military campaign. Heroic figures appear centre stage, full face and overlit. Peasants find cause to dance in the streets or frolic in fields. Political issues and internal disputes are invisible, airbrushed or rewritten in line with the victorious party's platform or leadership egos. The resultant self-image of proud new nations is displayed ingenuously in many state-sponsored movies. Even in Israel's The Little Traitor.

It is such an old-fashioned cliche-splattered piece of stagy film-making that a 21st-Century movie-goer might assume it was produced around 1950, soon after the creation of Israel. The movie covers the last year of the British Mandate, as seen by an 11-year-old sabra (locally-born) boy in Jerusalem, "Proffy". It's hard to warm to the precocious, egocentric, would-be anti-British terrorist and frustrated killer, even though his young actor (Ido Port) smiles nicely at times.

His migrant parents are lovingly harsh, preoccupied with providing nocturnal safe passage for Jewish refugees from Europe. Consequently, believe it or not, his best adult influence will prove to be a middle-aged British army sergeant (Alfred Molina valiantly coping with a preposterous plotline and script). The Brit is studying Hebrew, he's bewitched by the second Book of Samuel, and he invites the clever boy to visit him at the army hotel for mutual exchanges of vocabulary. The man's army mates see nothing odd in his behaviour, which could lead a modern viewer to chuckle at the naivete of military men and their security systems back in the 1940s.

Maybe they were. The script, by producer-director Lynn Roth (a New Yorker and veteran US TV series producer) is supposedly based on a book by Amos Oz, an Israeli author Ms Roth claims is "world-renowned". The movie's final scene indicates that his book was based on the experiences of a possibly real Zionist professor called Avi Liebowitz. He met his British mentor in London, 30 years after the sergeant left Palestine and little Proffy had overcome charges of treachery for fraternising with the enemy.

By then, the sugariness of the fable had become life-threatening. Maybe none of the managers of Israel's film industry funds were younger than 70 when they met Ms Roth. Somehow, she persuaded them that their nation needed a 90-minute spoonful of schmaltz, celebrating the foundation of their nation with peace and goodwill to all, especially the nice Brits who left (unlike the evil Nazis) and the nice Arabs who sat around the marketplace smiling (the only Arabs to be seen) and the nice UN delegates who approved the establishment of Israel (unlike nasty Saudi Arabia etc).

Believe it not, this movie was released in 2007. It's reported that it won an award at a Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival and another in Palm Beach. Now, that I can believe.