Last night I saw a rather amazing movie called Paper Dolls. If I told you it was a documentary about Filipino transvestites taking care of old people in Israel, you would think you didn’t want to see it. But you would be wrong. Paper Dolls is neither preachy nor grotesque. It is made by an Israeli, but it is not pro-Israel: in fact, it uses this tiny and seemingly eccentric corner of Israeli life as a way of looking at the whole culture (ours as well as Israel’s) from an odd and telling angle. The film is as powerful as a novel, in emotional terms, and as subtle as a short story — that is, it trusts us, the audience, to pick up the necessary information and make the necessary judgments. Its portrayal of character is grippingly complex and yet in some curious way nearly instantaneous: we leave the theater feeling we know these people well, though we have barely peeked into their lives.
The movie’s success is largely due, I suspect, to the intelligence and sensitivity of its young director, Tomer Heymann. Though he apparently set out to make a film about that perennial documentary concept, The Other, in the form of these not-real women who call themselves “paper dolls” precisely to signal that unreality, he soon found himself enveloped in their story, and his presence on the screen turns out to be an essential part of the narrative. Tomer Heymann is like the anti–Michael Moore: his investigative method is gentle and delicate, the epitome of negative capability. This is not to say that he shuns directness (“But what do you do with your dicks?” he asks one of the transvestites, and gets a detailed answer), and he is by no means a pushover: when one of the Filipinos gets arrested as an illegal immigrant, he calls up the prison authorities and heatedly asks, “Can I come visit him?…Well, who can I speak to who isnot just a small cog?” But despite his strength in moments like these, Heymann conveys an overwhelming quality of softness—not something we are used to seeing in Israelis of any political stripe. It becomes clear, when we see him onscreen, exactly how he won the confidence of these foreign transvestites and converted them from “subjects” into “friends.”
What we see, in the course of the movie, is a small community of Filipino cross-dressers who hang around the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv. They take care of frail old people during the day (having been brought to Israel precisely to do this kind of work—that is, to fill a role that the Israelis are unable or unwilling to fill), and at night they meet to perform a song-and-dance act in various transvestite dives. There are five whom we get to know well: Chiqui, Giorgio, Cheska, Jan, and Sally. In addition to following them about during their off-hours, Heymann shows us scenes of them with their elderly charges, where the primary impression conveyed is one of tenderness. This kind of labor is not just a way to earn money (though it is, crucially, that); the Filipino “guest-workers” happen to be very good at care-taking, and they put their hearts into their work.
Some hearts respond more deeply than others. At the center of the movie is the almost filial relationship between Sally (perhaps the most appealing of the transvestites) and Chaim, the old man she takes care of. Chaim cannot speak—throat cancer has claimed his voice—but he writes things down for Sally to say on his behalf, and she has learned Hebrew well enough to read what he writes. He corrects all her little grammar errors, too, and takes the trouble to teach her more Hebrew by having her read aloud from the poetry of Yehuda Amichai. This relationship stands in sharp contrast to the obliviousness of most of the other old people (a Hasid with Alzheimer’s, a paralyzed man, a wheelchair-bound wreck in a skull cap) who are served by Filipino caregivers. But whether the difference lies in Chaim’s personality or in Sally’s, or in some unpredictable combination of the two, remains an open question.
Paper Dolls is not afraid to look at the seamier side of life in Israel. A bomb explodes in the region of the Central Bus Station, and foreign residents are urged to go to the hospital for care; a television report assures them that they will not be prosecuted for being illegal. Later we see the immigration police sweeping over the area and making arrests. A nasty cab-driver spits venomous comments about these “disgusting” creatures who are neither man nor woman, and passers-by cast superior, unfriendly looks at them. A well-meaning but rather sleazy impresario tries to spiff up the Paper Dolls’ act by converting them into Japanese geishas; they try it out once, at a big-time gay nightclub, but soon decide that the heartless limelight is not for them, and they retreat back into their own warm community. This sense of warmth, against a background of poverty, discrimination, and violence, is perhaps the movie’s most startling characteristic; it is not sentimental, but it will probably make you cry.
Paper Dolls will not be playing soon at a cinema near you. After it leaves the Film Forum in New York, it is scheduled to continue on its journey to various international film festivals, searching for its audience. But try asking for this movie, in whatever way you can, and perhaps it will someday come your way.
—September 12, 2006