The Slut (Hanotenet) By Hagar Ben Asher

Israel, Germany (2011) - Critics’ Week

By saying that “Tamar offers her body to many men of the village”, the synopsis does not explain the important fact that the protagonist is not a prostitute, having sex for money. This woman has regular multiple partners for her own pleasure, and – an extremely rare thing in the movies – she is never condemned or judged for it. She is a good mother and worker, with no particularly negative personality traits.

All men are aware of her “night visits”, none are jealous, and if someone comes to visit her and sees that another person is already in her bed, he’ll go away. This a silent and per- fectly stable society in which Tamar is the only adult female visible in the whole story,even though all the men are married, someof them with children. While other mothersand wives are conveniently hidden by thenarrative inside their homes, our heroineis always working in open spaces, waitingin her yard, resting on the veranda. For her,there is no separation between private andpublic: her body and her sexual activities arenot only accepted by the community, theyare also an important source of its stability.

This is why the arrival of love and affectionput the community’s structure at stake. No, Tamar does not fall in love (this is no tale of “redemption of promiscuity by love”), but one of the men does. The new monoga- mist relationship is cruelly punished by thescreenplay and by the characters, in a shoc- king, controversial conclusion which pushes the moral and the – already sumptuous – aes- thetics to an even more unexpected level.

However, once we look back at it, maybe it couldn’t have been any different: this is one of those rare stories of free sexuality, in which love needs to adapt to sex, morals to pleasure, and not the other way around.

By Bruno Carmelo