Within its very first moments, John Boorman's perversely entertaining new film, The Tailor of Panama, cuts right to the chase. Pierce Brosnan, playing a morally dubious British secret agent being reprimanded by his superior, is given a last chance before being drummed out of the service. Redemption is out of the question. For the cumulative character lapses of a lifetime — The gambling debts, the wives, the wives, sighs his boss, the sins … — Brosnan's character is being shuffled off, out of sight, out of mind. He is summarily sentenced to an indefinite gig in the distant, international cesspool of Panama, a place his boss informs him is more rife than ever with drug smuggling, money laundering and all manner of corruption.
Really? drawls Brosnan's very bad spy, a perfectly arched brow and a mischievous half-smile hinting at what's to come.
Brosnan's Andy Osnard is clearly not your father's 007 and, in all likelihood, not yours either. Osnard is the dark and greasy side of James Bond, a 007 without the charm, mystery, class or even the basic common decency. He's the sort of guy who's only in it for the money, who openly makes fun of a secretary's scarred face, who leers at women and then hits them if they refuse his advances. He's also a wonderfully compelling anti-hero, and Boorman's casting of Brosnan (the first credible post-Connery Bond) takes the piss out of the myth in a way that is nothing short of brilliant.
Based on a novel by John Le Carre, The Tailor of Panama is a sly, cynical little tale about a world where very little is as it seems and everything and everyone is for sale. The Panama setting is likened at several points to a Casablanca without heroes, and so it is: This truly does appear to be a world composed of an infinite variety of grays, but at least everybody has a sense of humor about it.
Primary among those gray areas is Harry Pendel (Geoffrey Rush), a transplanted English tailor and longtime Panama resident who has some not-quite kosher secrets of his own. The plot quickly kicks into gear when Andy blackmails Harry into helping him with a nasty little get-rich scheme that reveals itself over the course of the film. It's a game, insists Osnard of his insidious plan. Let's have fun.
Andy's master plan plays on everyone's greed, paranoia and unblinking jingoism, culminating in a fiasco of such monumental proportions it actually brings the world-shaking scenario of Dr. Strangelove to mind. The beauty of Boorman's film is that the whole mess becomes so enormously sticky and exaggerated that it actually transcends the obvious tragedy of what's happening and begins seeming, somehow, simply funny. Likewise for all of the characters in this deliciously droll little anti-thriller — the good men who do bad things, and the outrageous super-creeps who get away with it all.
In the closed and closeted world of Kadosh — a world inhabited by the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Jerusalem — ritual is all. The film opens with a bearded man waking up in the twin bed next to the woman we assume to be his wife. Even before he wipes the sleep from his eyes, the man immediately covers his head with the little yarmulke by the side of the bed and offers up a prayer to the source of all truth for rendering his soul to him. Then the man washes his hands, says a prayer over the washing of hands, and puts on his inner and outer garments in exactly the way that we know he's been doing for years, exactly as his ancestors have done for centuries before him.
The camera takes a fly-on-the-wall approach to all of this, positioning itself in the corner of the room and remaining motionless, simply, patiently observing the man's morning ritual, a five-minute-plus routine conducted in near-darkness and shot with nary a cut or camera move. Kadosh director Amos Gitai is a filmmaker who knows how to be patient, how to observe (and, when appropriate, how to move in for the proverbial kill at precisely the right instant). Gitai is a respected Israeli director best known as a maker of documentaries, and Kadosh is his first fiction feature — although it is firmly rooted in a such a specific and powerful reality that the movie fairly rings with a documentary-like truth of its own.
The opening ritual sequence of Kadosh concludes as Gitai's bearded subject sits down next to his wife and gently caresses her — one of the few acts of tenderness we'll see pass between a man and a woman for the rest of the film. The man touches the woman's cheek and notes how her eyes glisten. Women cry, she responds, even when they're sleeping.
The tears of women are the essential ingredient of Kadosh (which means sacred in Hebrew), a grim, often devastating film about two sisters whose lives are made increasingly miserable and eventually shattered by the zealous religious community to which they belong. Rivka (Yael Abecassis), the crying woman in the opening sequence, finds her once-idyllic marriage crumbling and herself becoming the target of public scorn because of what is perceived as her inability to bear children. Rivka's feisty younger sister, Malka (Meita Barda), is promised to a man she doesn't love, a loutish Talmudic scholar whose wedding night performance more closely resembles a war crime than an act of love.
Kadosh takes us into the inner sanctums of Jerusalem's ultra-Orthodox Mea Shearim neighborhood, its private apartments, its places of study and worship, even its bedrooms — where, just for the record, couples apparently don't do it through a hole in a sheet, as is commonly reported.
Things quickly go from bad to worse, though, and all of the women eventually get the short end of the stick, at best. Kadosh ultimately reveals itself as a deeply unsettling and thoroughly scathing indictment against the male-dominated religious sect it depicts. In fact, in its own quiet, culturally-specific way, the film presents us with as profound and timeless a portrait of the plight of women as The Life of Oharu did nearly half a century ago, or, for that matter, as any of Mizoguchi's other films about geishas struggling with their lots in life.
Kadosh, which is the first Israeli film in 25 years to be accepted for official competition at the Cannes Film Festival, will be presented for one night only on April 21 as part of a special benefit at Channelside Cinemas. The screening will be followed by a discussion of the film and a catered reception, with ticket proceeds benefiting the Florida Gulf Coast Jewish Film Festival and National Tay-Sachs and Allied Diseases Association. If the Kadosh benefit does exceptionally well — that is, if it's a sell out — the movie may return to Channelside for a regular run. As is almost always the case with these things, though, one never knows, so be aware that the benefit screening may very well turn out to be your only chance to catch this troubling but exceptional film.The Tailor of Panama
This article appears in Apr 19-26, 2001.