Reviews

This collection of scenes was the opening night film at this year's Israeli Film Festival in Sydney. There were noisy protests by anti Israel protesters outside the cinema. Had they seen the movie, they would have welcomed it as an effective contribution to the Hamas war effort. I have ticked the IMDb "may contain spoilers" box as it is hard to know with a plot as bizarre as this one what key points should not be revealed. I am writing some details as that is the only way I can describe the boring absurdity of this film. The story opens with an Israeli woman in bed next to her husband when the bed collapses, causing her to bump her head and get a headache. Her husband then leaves for overseas on a business trip. The woman orders a new bed on the phone and we gather that she has concussion as she doesn't seem to know her own name. Later a man arrives stating that he is a chef whom she had ordered to cook crabs for herself and her husband at their place but first he must soften the crabs by playing them violin music. A German film crew comes to interview her and she starts to gather that she must be an avant garde artist of some sort. The newly ordered bed arrives and when she tries to assemble it she finds there are only 4 screws when there are supposed to be 5. She complains to the bed company. Meanwhile we have been introduced to an Arab woman who has to pass through a checkpoint to get to her job, which consists of packing screws for the bed company. She is portrayed as morose and simple minded. When she is asked about the missing screw in the packet she empties her pockets and a whole collection of screws fall out and she is fired. We see some aspects of her home life, the gist of which is that some male acquaintance is trying to recruit her as a suicide bomber. Meanwhile the miserable amnesiac Israeli woman gets angry with a woman trying to take a selfie with her at an art exhibition and after flushing the other woman's phone down the toilet locks herself in the bathroom. A guard threatens to break the door down but we don't see what happened. We next see her wandering dazedly along a tall concrete barrier wall on which are painted some yellow flowers. Meanwhile the Arab simple minded woman has passed through the checkpoint again, picking up someone else's baby on the way and after a scuffle involving two Arab men she is put in a holding pen by the Israeli soldiers. There she is joined by the Israeli woman who for no explicable reason takes her headscarf and puts it on. The Arab woman is then mistaken for the Israeli woman and taken to the Israeli woman's home. I haven't put in the right sequence other scenes involving the Israeli woman talking about having a hysterectomy as a form of performance art or scenes involving her husband's computer and its automatic reversion to pages of pornography, as it is hard to remember what came where in a whole movie that didn't make sense. I think Hedda Gabler covered the issue of miserable morose women doing nothing much fairly well and I really don't think making the morose women Arab and Israeli or amnesiac and simple minded adds very much to the genre. Nor does absurdism work very well when it is not funny. I spent most of the movie wondering if it was all supposed to be a dream by one of the characters but gave up wondering and gave up caring. One star for the Skype session with the naked porn star on the screen.

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.

I saw this movie being shown in a Jewish film festival. Apart from the fact that two of the characters are supposed to be Jewish there is nothing Jewish about it. Nor did there seem to be anything very Argentinian about it. None of the characters is really fleshed out and there is no genuine character development or much by way of plot development. There are little items in the dialogue or glances by the camera that you feel may lead somewhere but never do. For example the lead character's baby sitter goes to sleep in his bed one night - so? Other things just don't gel - his father turns out to have had some terminal illness and is supposedly somehow preparing him to take over the law practice but shows no signs whatsoever of ill health and dies suddenly of unexplained cause - no hospitalisation, no nothing. The presumed main theme of the movie - a father learning to be a better father to his infant son is never really convincingly portrayed. Altogether this is a boring movie about fairly boring lives. My two rating stars are for the production values which are reasonable and the female lead who is quite pretty.