Aside from her enormous talent, what stood out in a new documentary about Inbal Perlmuter, “If You Let Me Go” (broadcast on Yes), was the ability of this soloist from the band Ha’machshefot (“The Witches”) to win the hearts of everyone around her. This film clearly shows that everyone who fell in love with her did so at first sight. I’ll admit that her songs and her voice also charmed me. And in the case of her songs, it was also love at first hearing.
Not all love is love at first sight. Nor is love at first sight necessarily true – or truer, if it’s even possible for truth to have degrees, than love at second sight. Nevertheless, there is something in Perlmuter’s talent, as there is in every real talent, that is impossible to withstand and undeniable – unless you lie. There are people who have been blessed with real talent, and when it’s realized, something happens that surpasses our mundane reality.
Yet great talent isn’t only a blessing. Sometimes it’s also a curse. Not just because it attracts countless parasites who want to live off it, but also because it rouses dangerous jealousy, the kind that can even kill.
It often seems that real talent doesn’t allow the people blessed with it to do anything other than what they have a talent for, to be anyone else or to live a different life. It’s as if the talent forces itself on the person who has it. Perlmuter was a rock star. She couldn’t be anything else.
The film informs us that she registered for classes at a university. I’ve already managed to forget which department she enrolled in, because it’s completely irrelevant. A world in which Perlmuter isn’t a rock star doesn’t exist. Even if the price was a short life filled with pain. The only recompense is that even “if it’s over” (the name of the film and of one of her famous songs), or when it’s over, it is never really over. It is eternal.
The film’s directors, Avigail Sperber and Sharon Luzon, shine a spotlight on Perlmuter in their film so the audience can see the stardust that surrounded her. But through guest appearances by two people who momentarily flicker by in archival clips from the 1990s, the directors manage to say something much bigger.
These two people are opposition politicians Yair Lapid and Merav Michaeli. They appear in the film in one of their previous incarnations, as television presenters – journalists who presented and interviewed Perlmuter.
People with great talent are trapped in a single possible life that might ultimately kill them. But others, the mediocre talents, can apparently live a million different lives, with no limits. When you see Lapid and Michaeli in the film, so lovely in their natural place, their current position in Israel’s reality seems inconceivable. When you pause for a moment and think about whom the main characters in Israel’s political drama are today, what has happened here seems inconceivable.
Here you have one woman with a talent that pours out of her like a waterfall, who could never have done anything but be a rock star and crash into a wall. And there you have two perfectly nice people – successful in their field, but nothing more than that – who, it turns out, can be anything they please.
Here he is as a television host, here he is as a bank’s celebrity branding, and here he is as prime minister. One day she’s a television and radio personality flirting on television with her interviewees, the next day she’s a radical feminist, the Eliezer Ben-Yehuda of gendered language. Here she’s preaching to Australians against parenthood, there she’s chairwoman of the Labor Party and a surrogate mother to two children.
When you pause for a moment to think about this, it’s impossible to avoid asking ourselves the following: Who did we send to win on our behalf?
The Erstwhile TV Presenters Masquerading as Israel’s Opposition
19
1
04.06.2023
Aside from her enormous talent, what stood out in a new documentary about Inbal Perlmuter, “If You Let Me Go” (broadcast on Yes), was the ability of this soloist from the band Ha’machshefot (“The Witches”) to win the hearts of everyone around her. This film clearly shows that everyone who fell in love with her did so at first sight. I’ll admit that her songs and her voice also charmed me. And in the case of her songs, it was also love at first hearing.
Not all love is love at first sight. Nor is love at first sight necessarily true – or truer, if it’s even possible for truth to have degrees, than love at second sight. Nevertheless, there is something in Perlmuter’s talent, as there is in every real talent, that is impossible to withstand and undeniable – unless you lie. There are people who have been blessed with real talent, and when it’s realized, something happens that surpasses our mundane reality.
Yet great talent isn’t only a........
© Haaretz
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