Be Tipul: A Conversation With Yael Hedaya

I have seen some episodes of the HBO version of the Israeli program Be Tipul and I have never really liked it. It seems forced and airless. There is a dead energy to the whole enterprise; it feels more like a whispered, solemn confessional than something that happens to people every day.
But tonight at the Museum of the Moving Image, as part of the Pen World Voices Festival, I saw an episode of the original series Be Tipul and was blown away. The writing by Yael Hedaya was magnificent, the young female patient and the shrink were amazing actors, and the whole thing felt as if we were a fly in the wall of that room.
The Israeli production is much more bare bones than the American version, which, as Hedaya pointed out, is very elegant and has very good taste. But this makes it rather musty and inauthentic, whereas the shrink's office in Be Tipul is more lived in. Actual sunlight streams through the windows. The bookcases are cheap, the books, dogeared. The light is harsh. Flies could actually sit on those walls.
Most of the episodes of the American version are almost straight transcriptions from the original series, but then what accounts for the enormous difference in authenticity and emotional impact? I'm guessing a number of things, besides the infusion of cash: There is a tendency in American films and TV to overdramatize. The prevailing notions of screenwriting are that the writer must never leave well enough alone, everything has to be escalated and amplified until it barely resembles reality. I understand that drama needs to be extraordinary, but in the case of Be Tipul and Hedaya's writing, this is achieved by a fine ear for unadorned reality and by her great insight into human motive, rather than by forcing every single beat. 
There is a scene in this episode, in which Naama, the young patient who has a crush on Reuven, her shrink, tells him of a sexual experience she had with an older man when she was still a minor. There is so much power in what she leaves unsaid, in the possibility of what she is conscious of saying and what she isn't, that the richness of our experience of her is almost too much. She remembers the flirtation fondly and she laughs with great warmth and embarrassment at the memory of her and her lover singing silly Passover songs. This moment of naked candor took my breath away. I have not seen one episode of the American series where something like this happens. In the stateside version everything is fraught and ponderous and super acty, yet ersatz, even when played by excellent actors like Diane Wiest, John Mahoney or Hope Davis. The Israeli original has the rhythm and the breath of life, whereas the HBO version feels like staged Drama with a capital D. It all boils down to sensibility. As Hedaya said, the HBO series looks great, but it's not messy enough. Hedaya, who was very diplomatic when asked her opinion of the HBO series (she'd love to get a writing gig with them), claimed that she has seen only a few episodes, said that it was strange for her to see her work transposed, and her characters transformed, and called it "emotional plastic surgery". That's exactly what it is.
Hedaya was incredibly funny, smart and charming as she spoke of her own experiences with therapy, which she claims she loves and for many years thought that it should be all intellectual mind games, flirting and fun. Her lifelong dream was to go to therapy (here's a woman after my own heart; someone who loves the attention and who could talk about herself for fifty minutes straight to an audience of one). Her idea of a dreamboat therapist was based on Woody Allen, an intellectual, older neurotic guy. Flirtation was a must. It was news to her that the main purpose of therapy was to actually help people. She said that in Israel therapists really liked the series (everyone agrees that the therapist is very sympathetically and realistically portrayed), and it made such a splash that people started wanting to go to therapy but they all expected their shrinks to be just like Reuven, (played by Assi Dayan, son of Moshe Dayan). Therapists even raised their fees according to what Reuven charged in the program.
Rarely does life imitate good art.
Hedaya is a novelist and this seems to be a bigger source of pride for her than her screenwriting work. She said it was easy to switch from descriptive novel writing to scripts but that writing scripts has not influenced her novels, which I now want to read. I found it interesting that she was a bit dismissive of her script work, because if the episode we saw is any indication, it is top notch writing, regardless of the medium.
Since the venue was very intimate and Hedaya was very open, this was one delightful talk. The audience, comprised of both therapists and lay people, felt we could relate to her and the Q&A was fun, spirited and smart.

Pen World Voices Festival

I have been invited to blog about this interesting annual literary fest, taking place this week in our fair city. This post appears at the Pen page, but I post it here as well for my dear readers:
Opening Night for this festival used to be at Town Hall, which was cavernous and felt too big for something as intimate as literature. Last night it took place at The Lighthouse at Chelsea Piers, overlooking the coast of New Jersey and the Hudson river, which was very nice. The evening's theme, as far as I could tell, had to do with water, and that had something to do with freedom, though it is unclear to me exactly why. The concept was "Written on Water". I'm not sure I understand what this means. To me, whatever you write on water will disappear as you are writing it, and literature is quite the opposite, the only thing that remains of those who practice it. They turn to dust, but their written words remain. Perhaps the theme is meant as a reflection on the precarious state of literature these days, what with bloggers instead of writers, and screens instead of pages, and book shops going out of business. In any case, the Pen World Voices Festival is always a bracing reminder for us to read and to write.
   I have to confess that when I started attending this enlightening festival, I quickly discovered that I am not a fan of readings as much as I am of discussion panels, where there is more of a frisson as you listen to your favorite writers, or writers you don't know, discuss with each other (are they nasty, naughty, or nice?). The downside is the part where the audience asks questions, but that is a topic for another post.
   Perhaps literary writers do not suffer from ADD like the rest of humanity and are hence impervious to the concept of length. For some reason, the readers were seated at the back of the auditorium, and they walked down the main aisle like participants in a wedding, which made the proceedings longer. On the other hand, a festival of literature has every right to take its time; it is not a festival of twittering. It may be actually very beneficial to sit down, concentrate for a bloody second and listen to narratives of more than 140 characters.
   Happily, there was booze for sale. As a liquid, alcohol is a perfect, and very necessary lubricant for literary readings. I should have bought a drink, but since I was blogging for this august publication, I wanted to be extra sober. So to honor the the spirit of the evening, I drank water. It was very good.
   The evening started out with Iva Bittova, an artist who is some sort of a cross between Yma Sumac, Diamanda Galas and Jascha Heifetz. I thought that it would have been cooler to have an actual singer/songwriter who writes words for songs, which would have been more appropriate to a festival of writing (this is a euphemism for I wish they had cut the pretentious crap). 
   Another confession I have to make is that I came to this event because I am in love with Hanif Kureishi. It's been a while since my heart fluttered for any writer in a groupie kind of way, but this man makes it happen. And he did not disappoint. His reading was the funniest, most biting, entertaining and lovely reading of the evening. I have such a crush on him, that I spent a good while after his appearance debating whether to stalk him (I could see him standing in the side lines towards the end of the evening), confess my admiration and my passion and have a quick, torrid, fabulous affair with him. He is hot. And smart. And funny (and he has written some very nifty movies: My Beautiful Launderette, Intimacy, The Mother, Venus). As far as I'm concerned, he was the highlight of the evening. I also very much liked the poor soul who had to read right after him, Mircea Cartarescu, with a faux naive, pithy and sardonic poem about his crush on Natalie Wood as a way to escape Romanian reality.
   The foreign writers read in their own languages with a translation provided on screens. It is wonderful to listen to works in a language one doesn't understand and yet one tries to follow the inflection in the voice, or some similar words. As I speak Spanish, I could compare the original language in the poems of Gioconda Belli to the translation. I could not decide if the omission of certain words in the translation was an improvement or not. Belli likes to use words that only appear in literature: nenúfar, velamen, cardúmen, ingrimo, a word I had never heard before, and which means "alone". I also speak Hebrew, but the Hebrew in the poems of Agi Mishol was so poetic there were entire swaths of words that were new to me, even though they sounded like they came from an ancient, mysterious treasure chest.
   Malcolm Gladwell, who said he felt like the segment on Sesame Street in which there is something different from the rest, because he was the only non-fiction writer in the bunch, read a short and effective passage about planes spiraling down. Apparently, because of gravity, when a plane is in spiral descent, you can't really feel it. This will become a small comfort to me from now on every time I fly.  I may not know I am about to die until I disintegrate. Phew.
   In general, I think the writers were divided into two categories (insofar as my own personal taste): precious and non-precious. I am firmly in the camp of the non-precious. That is the reason why I stayed all the way to the end until Wallace Shawn and Deborah Eisenberg read (from Shawn's play The Designated Mourner). Non-precious is an understatement with Shawn. He read a bit in which a character describes how he urinated and then defecated on a book, simply to prove that it was possible. And that's the note the evening ended with. You want freedom? There you have it.