‘Beetle’ takes PBS viewers on diverting Mid-East road trip July 4

By MICHAEL FOX

article created on: 2010-07-01T00:00:00

In Israel, childhood ends when you get married, or so Yishai Orian informs us at the outset of his charming shaggy-dog story of a movie.

But after six years of marriage, with his wife about to give birth to their first child, there’s some question whether the pony-tailed filmmaker has actually grown up.

The physical manifestation of his extended adolescence is the prized four-wheeled possession that gives “The Beetle” its name. Dating from the early ‘60s and seemingly on its last legs, the little yellow car with the mismatched red hood screams a lot of things, none of them “adult.”

“The Beetle” airs at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. July 4 on PBS channel 258 “Global Voices.”

This utterly engaging and frequently poignant first-person documentary departs from the norm in a couple of interesting ways. The wiry, bespectacled Orian is anything but handsome, and his nerdy appearance combined with a figuring-it-out-on-the-fly approach to life encourages the viewer to underestimate him. We pick up the faintest whiff of Woody Allen in Orian’s performance, not least when he proves himself to be tougher and stronger than we expected.

My use of the word “performance” may have alerted you to the other element that distinguishes “The Beetle” from the usual first-person documentary. Orian has a natural screen presence but he rarely seems surprised or spontaneous. Controlled and calculated is more like it, even though he goes to some lengths to make us think otherwise.

This subtle subterfuge does not detract from our enjoyment of “The Beetle,” mostly because it is part and parcel of the film’s occasionally surreal blend of real life and staged scenes. Early in the movie, for example, three different angles—including a camera affixed to the hood of the car and pointed at its occupants—are employed to record a supposedly impromptu argument between Orian and his wife Eliraz while he drives her to work in the Beetle.

Seemingly resigned to selling his beloved Beetle and getting a family sedan, Orian first decides to visit as many of the car’s previous owners as he can locate. These meetings provide the film’s most powerful vignettes, laced as they are with mysterious, ephemeral and ineffably profound moments of human experience.

So as not to diminish your pleasure at encountering these scenes for yourself, I’ll only recount the story of the car’s first owner. In one of those odd, forgotten footnotes to history, Germany shipped several thousand Beetles to Israel in the 1960s as part of its reparations for war crimes. To forestall any potential objections, Germany declared the cars were made in Belgium, a claim backed by documentation and the Israeli government.

The original owner of Orian’s Beetle boycotted German goods, his surviving son relates. When he discovered that he had, in fact, purchased a German car and not a Belgian one—with his government in on the charade—he not only sold the vehicle but emigrated in disgust to the United States.

“The Beetle” is one of those endearing films that present itself as a comedy but turns out to have more on its mind than easy laughs. There are times when Orian pushes his conceit a tad too far, and comes dangerously close to preciousness, but it will be the hard-hearted moviegoer who isn’t seduced by his camaraderie and heart.

Michael Fox is a writer in San Francisco.