52/72: AN AMERICAN HIPPIE IN ISRAEL

by Anthony King

It's official: I hate hippies.

Apparently some people have said Amos Sefer's Israeli counter-cultural, all-but-forgotten film An American Hippie in Israel is the worst movie of all time. For me, that honor goes to Harold P. Warren's Manos: The Hands of Fate (1966). Even more people have said American Hippie is the worst Israeli film of all time. Of my extremely limited viewing of Israeli films, this I can agree with. It's not good. It's not even one of those (that I don't believe in, generally speaking) so-bad-it's-good movies. American Hippie gets an automatic half star for being a movie. It gets another half star for casting a very creepy-looking lead. And it gets a full star for completely unexplained and out of place hitmen/ghosts(?) hunting down the titular character.

Asher Tzarfati is the American hippie of which the title speaks, credited as “The Hitchhiker.” I can only assume that his on-screen persona doesn't differ much from his actual persona. He's got a smile that curls like the Grinch's. He has vertical eyebrows that scream “menace.” He's got the charisma of a dish rag. And he could easily be a Charlie Manson stand-in. Because of this I kept watching. He's a terrible actor, as are the other people that populate the film, most of whom had zero acting experience prior. He's a delusional dreamer tired of his country and government who thumbs a ride with a free-spirited young woman. The Hitchhiker convinces her that the only way to live is to start their own commune, so they gather a group of 20-or-so other like-minded individuals, bottle them in an abandoned barn and sing songs of peace that only exists in a drug-induced state, before The Hitchhiker charges into a psychotic antidisestablishmentarianistic diatribe. Some ideas he speaks of are at most interesting, while most of what he rambles on about makes zero sense. During his speech, two pale-faced men in black suits and top hats burst in and machine gun the entire group, minus the fearless leader, his girl, another man who doesn't speak English, and his girl. The four flee the country to Israel where they buy a lamb and drive aimlessly down the coast until The Hitchhiker inexplicably yells, “We're here!” while pointing to a tiny, rocky island off the coast. The four abandon the car, grab the lamb, hop in a raft, and sail away to their new colony where they discover there's no food, safe shelter, or water to drink. The Hitchhiker volunteers to swim back to the car and go shopping, but while swimming runs into sharks (literal inflatable sharks just floating on the water) and has to turn back. The group turns against one another and they all go mad.

Things I found halfway positive about the movie:
The movie doesn't seem to take a stance pro- versus anti-hippie, which I liked.
The Hitchhiker has returned from Vietnam and is obviously dealing with severe PTSD.
An interesting dream sequence where the galavanting free spirit of The Hitchhiker is juxtaposed against real world devastation and despair and poverty.
Clearly The Hitchhiker has no plan and is just winging it; whether that was just how poor the acting was or if it was a conscious decision I'll never know, but it came off well.

This movie is not boring, the ultimate cinematic sin.

While I'm closer to anarchist than authoritarian, I've never understood the hippie mentality. When I was a full time musician I spent a lot of time around a hippie-type crowd, and I couldn't stand any of them. Can you at least pretend to live in the real world? It was impossible to have a semi-serious conversation with any of them. They were gross. And I totally saw this weird cult mentality. So when Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood (2019) came out I understood Rick Dalton's frustrations. With that in mind, clearly I came to American Hippie with a little baggage, but that didn't deter me from giving it a fair shot. After 10 minutes I knew this movie wasn't for me, but it wasn't so bad I wanted to turn it off. It wasn't until the clearly-added-to-pad-the-runtime dance sequence on a rocky Israeli beach that I completely turned against the movie. (Although, the inflatable sharks almost brought me back.)

I can't say for certain but it seems that Sefer is wearing on his sleeve the influence of someone like Alejandro Jodorowsky and his film El Topo (1970). While I think American Hippie may be more “similar” to Jodorowsky's The Holy Mountain, that film wasn't released until a year after Sefer's. While it's taken me a few viewings to (not quite) fully appreciate El Topo, I don't see the same happening with American Hippie. Jodorowsky's command of cinematic language and surreal storytelling is obviously far superior to Sefer's, and it's not really fair comparing the two (because no one can compare to Jodorowsky), but it's the closest comparison speaking to the counter-cultural and surrealistic vision. The main difference between El Topo and An American Hippie in Israel is that El Topo is good, and I'll watch it several more times, and American Hippie is terrible, and I'll never watch it again.

Oh, the goat lives, by the way. Quarter star increase. Can’t say that about the bunnies in El Topo.