I saw this movie at a Jewish film Festival and it looked interesting on paper. However, from the strange opening scene where the protagonist, a French Israeli gets into conversation on a train with a Dutch Palestinian woman and after a brief interlude with a passport inspecting official he and the woman start kissing passionately, the movie got more and more bizarre, seemingly for bizarre's sake. The fact that there is no further reference in the movie to that Palestinian woman is an indication either that the director forgot that he put that scene in or that he had no intention of making a movie which made sense. Similar bizarre scenes involve an American black woman singing operatic songs in German over the dead body of the protagonist's father. She sings beautifully but there is no explanation of who she is or why she is there in the first place. Dangling from the ceiling around the father's dead body are dreidles and menorahs - Jewish symbols which have absolutely no place around the dead bodies of either observant or vehemently non-observant Jews. Juliet Binoche, playing the sister or rather adoptive stepsister of the protagonist spends most of the first half of the film apparently trying to seduce her stepbrother. While the scene of her flaunting her admittedly very attractive naked body in front of him behind a darkened doorway is of great prurient interest, it doesn't lead to any actual plot developments or insight. Many other seemingly isolated scenes in the first half of the movie just left me wondering what the point was supposed to be. The second half of the movie, set at the time of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza but preposterously involving the Juliette Binoche character going to Gaza to meet her long estranged daughter is somewhat less puzzling than the first half. However, it tediously portrays the actions of the soldiers and the settlers with no new insights into the nature of the conflict or the issues involved. I would have thought that an Israeli director would have something more to say about the disengagement than just that it happened. I watched this movie with my 18-year-old daughter and it was so bad that it has put her off going to the rest of the film Festival. I can't blame her.
Review of Disengagement
