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The Operation was Successful, the Viewer Died (from Suspense)
By Yaron Fried HAARETS
In a forgettable comedy by Garry Marshall, an operation is performed while the audience watchs from the gallery, like at a play.
The patient dies and one of the viewers consoles his distressed wife, “Don’t cry, it’s only an operation”. No words of consolation will help here.
This isn’t a comedy, it isn’t “E.R.”, it certainly isn’t a watered down reality project. This is real life, and once again it is better than any script.
Eight years of filming in four hospitals in Israel and Cyprus produced seven episodes. They are difficult to watch and at times, hard to bear, like life itself. A boy on a respirator, with a serious head injury, fights for his life. A harvested heart is flown in a cooler to an urgent transplantoperation.
“You’re shooting an exhausted surgeon”, says the heart surgeon to the director,Tzvika Vloch, after the successful surgery. But Vloch, who during the course
of the project developed cancer and went from being a observer to a case study, continues to film without batting an eye,as he does everything else.
Every external bleed, every cut artery, every heart fibrillation, every widening of the pupils, each mother’s kiss on her sedated son’s forehead and every telephone call made by the father, reporting that his dear one’s life is in danger. All this is edited at a dizzying rate and with a storytelling-momentum that immediately tiesus emotionally to the heroes. There is great concern for their well-being and the general tension is almost unbearable. The courageous are guaranteed a powerful experience.
