Director Guy Nattiv takes an artistic, sometimes even surrealistic look at Golda Meir, brilliantly played by Helen Mirren.
Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel from 1969 to 1974, was in power during the Yom Kippur War, during which Israel fought Syria and Egypt from October 6 to 24, 1973.
Golda recounts in an uninterrupted flashback how she testified about her behavior before a commission of inquiry – the only woman before a string of men who questioned her strategic and military decisions. We see her interacting with Moshe Dayan (Rami Heuberger) – who vomits in horror at seeing the situation on the front lines -, with Zvi Zamir (Rotem Keinan), the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, with Ariel Sharon ( Ohad Knoller) or with Nixon’s Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Liev Schreiber), whom she convinces to help her country.
She doesn’t hide from her assistant Lou Kaddar (Camille Cottin) her fragility, her doubts, the devastating effects of her cancer, the severity of the treatments she undergoes before taking a few puffs of a cigarette before going for a booster shot the morale of the Israeli soldiers in the combat zone.
Guy Nattiv does not deny admiring Golda, a character still controversial in Israel but valued in the United States, whom he humanises, using raw archival images (ie showing the real Golda Meir) to capture specific moments illustrate. The impeccable sound mix of inventiveness skilfully mixes everyday noises – even the cigarettes are skilfully exploited – and military cacophony – we notice how the blades of a fan become the blades of a sound helicopter.
Helen Mirren is flawless as Golda Meir and fits into her character, whose gait and demeanor she inherited; Just the shape of her eyes sometimes reminds us who she is. One cannot help but compare her performance to that of Judy Davis as young Golda and Ingrid Bergman as old Golda in the notable TV movie A Woman Named Golda (1982); Bergman, who was suffering from cancer at the time of filming, had refused any makeup and only accepted a wig. Radiant with health and stunning on her red carpet appearances, Helen Mirren couldn’t have looked so convincing without prosthetics and makeup.
If we regret the brevity of the feature film, which with its 100 minutes assuming we know the life of Golda Meir, and some visual flaws (including a spell-breaking single insertion of Helen Mirren in archive videos), then the… The fact is that this Golda impresses and that this woman continues to fascinate us with her courage, her resilience and her doubts.
Rating: 3.5 out of 5