Film
Beetle mania
by Guy Somerset
Guy Somerset reviews The Beetle.
There aren’t many cars about which you could make a documentary like The Beetle. There’s the Mini. The Morris Minor. The MG. And maybe a few others (even ones that don’t begin with M): cars that excite a loyalty and sense of identification beyond their mere functionality; a passion that strays into fanaticism. Let’s put it this way: you’re unlikely to see anyone making The Corolla any time soon.
Israeli Yishai Orian, director of The Beetle, bought his VW the week of his wedding in 2001, and his film finds him six years later, with his wife, Eliraz, heavily pregnant and wanting a family car that will make it up Jerusalem’s hills – not a 40-year-old “piece of junk” whose resale value is less than the price of the pram for which we see the couple shopping.
Or, rather, for which we see Eliraz shopping. Orian is by her side going through the motions – but, really, not there at all, carping at the prices, more engaged with his car than he is with impending family life.
And that, as much as the car itself, is the subject of The Beetle. “Is it hard to be a parent?” Orian asks one of the car’s four former owners, each of whom he traces and interviews (or at least the son of the first owner, who is now dead). “It is fascinating to be a parent,” she replies. “It is the thing.”
It is a thing that it takes Orian the rest of the film to come to appreciate – while Eliraz is left to endure his absences and no less infuriating presence with looks that grow from the long-suffering to all-out despair. There are many low-points, but none more memorable than the shot of her after an ultrasound push-starting the car while Orian sits at the wheel.
Should Israeli television ever remake Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, Orian is their man – as hapless and obsessively natured, and as unflinching in training the camera on exchanges so excruciating you can barely look. (The twisted black tragi-comedy recounted by the first owner’s son, one that captures something of the extra layer of the Beetle being a German car in Israel, is pure David – all the more twisted, all the blacker, for being real.)
But alongside the comedy – as Orian embarks on first (reluctantly) selling the car and then (insanely) restoring it by travelling to a cheap garage in Aqaba in neighbouring Jordan perilously close to Eliraz’s due date – there is a deep vein of humanity running through the film, from Orian’s touching relationship with the Arab mechanics working on the car to previous owners’ stories, which include both a birth in the passenger seat and the unspeakable sadness of parents who lost their young daughter to cancer. Life and death in a Beetle.
