The Good Person

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM TALLINN

Hot shot film producer Sharon (Moran Rosenblatt) flies home from abroad only to discover that her husband won’t let her past the gate entryphone to their home on arrival. Furious, she borrows (or, technically, steals) his parked car so she can go about her business. On arrival at her empty office, her long-standing assistant Alma (Lia Barnett) informs her that the bailiffs have taken everything.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, so she takes a meeting with another producer who under normal circumstancea she wouldn’t touch with a barge pole but who is snowed under with projects and wants her to take one of them off his hands. Thus, she becomes the producer of a comeback movie by a notorious womaniser who gave it all up to become an ultra-conservative rabbi, Uzi Silver (Rami Heuberger), a star who hasn’t worked for several years, i. The money is already in place from the Film Fund, so the project should be a piece of cake. It all looks too good to be true. And, as so often in life, when something looks too good to be true, it usually is.

Her fears abut the rabbi are confirmed when she learns that he won’t allow any women on the set apart from herself, nor will he negotiate with her (female) line producer in the room. And there’s no script – well, adapted from 1 Samuel 18-31 (this refers to the Hebrew Bible, which is apparently chaptered and versed slightly differently from the Christian one), the script is the story of King Saul visiting the Witch at Endor prior to his military defeat and his falling on his own sword. All she has to do is get someone to write a script and he’ll rubber stamp it. He himself is to play King Saul while his wife, the star who played alongside him on the last film before they got out of the movie business, is to play the Witch of Endor. To write the script, Sharon enlists the help of her old friend Shai (Uri Gottleib).

To reveal what happens next would be to spoil the film, except to say that this is one of those films where if anything can possibly go wrong for the central character, then it does. Somewhat curiously, it was billed in the festival blurb as a screwball comedy, however, I personally wouldn’t apply that label to it and fear anyone seeing this with that expectation would be severely disappointed. Thinking about it in retrospect, there IS comedy here, but it’s black comedy of the wry observation variety which may make you smile after the event but won’t make you laugh at the time.

The film is shot in stylish black and white apart from occasional sequences in preview theatres watching parts of the movie (only the odd clip here or there makes it into the film that we, the audience, are watching) which are in colour. This is scarely a new trick (see, for instance, Belfast, Kenneth Branagh, 2021) but it’s a tried and tested one that does the job. Elsewhere, the piece is nicely paced: director Anner and his editor keep it moving along nicely and you’ll agonise alongside Sharon as she undergoes one terrible experience after another.

Set in present day Jerusalem, it presents the movie business as essentially areligious in a wider culture which is clearly steeped in one of the major world religions, i.e. Judaism. The movie business is almost portrayed as a religion with its own set of irrefutable tenets (no-one puts it in these terms, but, for example, thou shalt offer opportunities for employment equally to members of both sexes) which are challenged, for good or ill, by those of conservative Orthodox Judaism (men should not touch or even associate with women, for they are unclean – my paraphrase) with the members of the Film Fund just as shocked as Sharon with Uzi’s “no women other than you on the set” demand to the point where they momentarily consider cancelling the funding.

You could argue, though, that non-association with women is exactly what Sharon’s husband does to her at the start of the piece. You could also argue that the only way she gets her films made is because she has a rich husband who bankrolls her (until, at the start of this, he no longer does) which makes it quite a smart sideswipe at the idea of the film producer who has got there by dint of hard work and talent alone. No-one suggests Sharon isn’t talented (although she’s fallen on producer’s hard times and the Uzi Silver / King Saul project is clearly her selling out, making something in which she doesn’t really believe in order to get some easy money), but equally it seems that without her husband, she is (financially) nothing, itself an ultra-conservative idea.

There would apear to be many more layers to this film on reflection, which might reveal themselves on further viewing; on first watch, however, it comes across simply as a great ride.

The Good Person plays in the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Medea

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM LOCARNO

This is a movie about deserts, both physically and of the mind. It features a character so fully realised and so compelling, we could easily follow her in and out of her emotional and spiritual turmoil for hours upon end. Georgian actress Tinatin Dalakishvili stars as a Russian woman based on the classic Greek myth, completely in command of her craft as she commits atrocious deeds while attempting to look for redemption for her sins.

The film is structured around an act of atonement, the titular character confessing her wrongdoings in an Orthodox Church somewhere in Israel. We begin in medias res, with her reciting her and her husband’s (Evgeniy Tsyganov) plans to move from Russia to the Holy Land, taking advantage of his Jewish heritage to build a new life together. The Greek Myth is transplanted to the modern phenomenon of post-Soviet immigration to Israel, many Jews from Russia, Belarus, Moldova and Ukraine using the opportunity to leave their world behind for a country beset with its own myriad clashes of cultures and ideals.

Is a new life possible or are you always bringing yourself and the baggage of your life with you? Even if you have a home, whether it’s in a settlement or in Jerusalem, can you be fully content? Medea suggests that Russian expats can never leave the past behind, using its mythical structure as a fascinating basis to explore both national identity and wider existential problems.

A rift forms in the relationship. To make up for it, she has sex with other men. Lots and lots of sex. Name a position and you’ll probably see it in this movie. But this is not just sex for the sake of it, but as an exploration of character. This is a woman in search of any way to reduce the natural aging process — whether through sex, religion or chemical solutions, she will stop at nothing in order to find a cure to the void at her centre. In the Holy Land, fulfilment is never far away either, suggesting that religion is basically a form of intercourse for the physically abstinent.

While these sex scenes will make the headlines, far more compelling scenes are found in the quiet conversations she has around Israel, whether its chats with a watch-maker about creating a watch that ticks backwards or a Mossad agent who can predict the future. It’s great to watch a film take its natural time, creating a unique journey of female self-fulfilment with a performance on a par with the likes of Tao Zhao in Ash is Purest White (Jia Zhangke, 2018) or Isabelle Huppert in Things To Come (Mia Hansen-Løve, 2016).

The ideas are so potent and the central character so fascinating, and the discourse so endless — I’m not getting into the myriad power dynamics at play here — it’s easy to forgive the winding, digressive road Medea takes. It’s not just about dialogue and character either, director Alexander Zeldovich keen to use cinematic language — through vast widescreen tableaus, surveillance-like long shots and primal imagery — to stress his points. This is greatly abetted by (and would be a very different film without) Alexey Retinsky’s score, evoking both Igor Stravinsky and Mica Levi in its experimentation, rhythmic presence and kitchen-sink collection of sounds, spanning choral music, techno rumblings and full-on expressionist orchestra to create a truly epic feel. At times it’s too much, but hey, when you swing for the fences, it’s worth hitting that ball as hard as you can.

After all, a film like Medea needs to be an epic. This is a proper myth of the desert, as resonant as any action-adventure or melodramatic journeyman story, a woman with a vast void at her centre trying anything that sticks to fill that hole. Made with true urgency and a sense of inevitability, Medea is cinema at its most spiritually probing. Just make sure to look past all the shagging.

Medea plays in Concorso internazionale at Locarno Film Festival, running from August 4th to 15th.

All Eyes Off Me (Mishehu Yohav Mishehu)

Avishag’s (Elisheva Weil) iPhone is cracked. These things happen, but it’s this kind of small detail that immediately invites the viewer to judge her. She sits in a dog park and watches the Israeli X factor on her broken screen; someone singing “Hurt” by Christina Aguilera. The film invites us to watch almost the entire clip along with Avishag, trying to square her love of mainstream television with her fantasies of extremely rough sex.

Her face is also cracked. She likes to be choked and slapped during intercourse. This comes as something as a surprise to her new paramour Max (Leib Lev Levin). He quickly jumps on the idea as he utterly adores Avishag, who has this quality of quickly making men swoon. The miracle of All Eyes Off Me is the way it takes this dirty premise and spins it into something rather profound, a low-key reverie on the unknowability of man.

Max and Avishag might be hitting it off, but Danny (Hadar Katz) is quickly losing touch with her youth. She’s just realised that she’s pregnant with Max’s baby, telling her friends at a party that she will get an abortion as soon as possible. Another girl details in blasé fashion both the terror and the ease of terminating a pregnancy, the camera lingering on Danny’s more-or-less unreadable reaction. Nonetheless, she cannot bring herself to tell Max the news, as he seems so absorbed in his new girlfriend. In a brave move, she disappears for the rest of the film, lingering over both Max’s and Avishag’s choices for the remaining runtime. We are left with an enigma, shafted from the story due to her inability to move forward.

Split into three related yet distinct parts that refract off one another like three interpretations of the same tune, Hadas Ben Aroya’s film is unpredictable, unnerving and quietly exhilarating. This generation of Israelis might be young, sexually liberated and drug-friendly; readily journeying to Paris and Berlin while down for experimentation without the moral baggage, but they can never talk about the future in any depth. Instead they live in an eternal present. Yet, behind this veneer of sexual freedom is something far more intriguing: an investigation into modern relationships that struck me with its precise dialogue, illuminating anecdotes and precisely framed movements. The acting is uniformly great, utilising unforced naturalism to bring conflicts to the fore while never letting them boil over into histrionics.

There is a touch of Jean Eustache’s The Mother and the Whore in this film, both in its unadorned approach to sex and relationships as well as a thorny investigation of the power within those relationships. And just like in The Mother and the Whore, director Hadas Ben Aroya is unafraid to simply allow characters to sit and bask in their feelings, usually while listening to an entire track — Yé-Yé pop and Israeli dad rock — play out from start to finish. This allows us to just sit with the characters and tune into their reality. Without exterior moralising or unnecessary exposition, this ambiguous chamber drama never gives too much away. I was constantly engaged by its fascinating, constantly shape-shifting form.

All Eyes Off Me played in the Panorama section of the 71st Berlinale. It also showed at the 25th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Avanti Popolo

This poetical, musical, political and a drunk story is a satire of war with an unexpected twist. Director Rafi Bukai’s debut is both an auteur piece and one of the most important Israeli classics in history, and it was selected to represent the country at the Academy Awards in 1987. It’s also the first film in young country’s history to use real Arabs in the lead roles. Not surprisingly, it faced a backlash from of the country’s MPs back in the day.

Set in the desert of Sinai, two Egyptian soldiers travel exhausted and thirsty right right at the end of the Six Day War in 1967, fought between Israel and Egypt. After a long journey and the loss of few comrades, the two men, Haled and Gassan, enter a journey sacrifice and hardship. Worn out by the heat of the desert, and the aftermath of a lost war, the pair bring an unexpected edge to their quest, with their amusing and practical approach to survival. The humour is brought about by contrasting stereotypical and Israelis and Arabs, and mocking the pointlessness of war. You will easily relate and identify with these adorable characters. As they laugh, you too will laugh. As they struggle, you too will struggle.

Highlights of the film include a scene when the two Arabs find an abandoned UN jeep with a dead Swedish soldier and take the alcohol from the vehicle for their own consumption. They also encounter a British journalist disappointed with the shortage of carnage and casualities. The movie climaxes when they befriend three Israeli soldiers, and they bond over the helplessness of the situation. This is a derision of folly and a satire of war. These unlikely friends reveal how politics and religion divide people who are made to believe that they are different.

Avanti Popolo busts war myths and taboos one by one. Notions of identity quickly dissipate as the the friends laugh, drink and sing ‘Avanti Popolo’, a popular tune from the Italian labour movement celebrating the red flag of communism. There are also plenty of homoerotic undertones. Eventually, the impossible friends have to part, and a final twist of fate will change their lives for good, leaving audiences stunned.

Avanti Popolo shows at the 26th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. It is part of the In Focus: Israel strand.