Utopian Transgressions: Intimate Relationships across Social Boundaries

Abstract

Miri Talmon, in her essay “Utopian Transgressions: Intimate Relationships across Social Boundaries,” notes that romance motion fiction, and in particular romantic comedies, offers an emotional and ideological confirmation of the stability and durability of romantic love in a rapidly transforming, constantly changing society. Romantic films, telenovelas, and romance TV drama series bring to the screen a utopian promise of the power of love to transcend social boundaries and hierarchies. Israeli cinema and television are created in a multicultural, immigrant society. Both motion fiction arts are fascinated by intercultural and inter-ethnic romance and its possible contribution to a cohesive, integrated society. In this chapter, Talmon focuses on the first season of the Israeli TV drama series Ananda (2012–2015), created by Dana Modan. Modan brings into the series her feminine and generational sensibilities, as well as the utopian trajectory of the romance genre. Ananda tells about a Jewish Israeli woman and an Arab Israeli man who fall in love against all odds in India of all places. The chapter discusses how the protagonists’ intimate relationship, which transcends national/social/cultural/religious boundaries in this made-for-TV utopian universe, as well as the discourse which surrounded this TV drama beyond the fictional romance offer alternative narratives and images, which bridge the social differences and reconcile them through harmony, intimacy, and true love.