***** MOVIE REVIEW | 'ALILA' No Peace in a City Teeming With Life By STEPHEN HOLDEN Published: February 27, 2004
The Israeli filmmaker Amos Gitai is an acerbic social critic who likes to point fingers and pick at warts, and "Alila," his acidly comic study of life in a flimsy Tel Aviv apartment complex, is a sour urban mosaic whose seedy characters, try as they might, can't get out of one another's faces. Their residence, jerry-built in a dreary working-class section of Tel Aviv, is anything but a sleek, well-appointed urban retreat basking in the sunlight; a grubby housing development baking in the heat is more like it.
The building's walls are so thin that everyone's private business is made public. In one grotesquely funny scene, Hezi (Amos Lavie), a secretive older man, carries on a flaming affair with Gabi (Yaël Abecassis), a masochistic young woman besotted with his macho self-assurance. Everyone knows about the relationship because even a hand clamped over a mouth can't silence the couple's raucous lovemaking. The affair has no future. The moment Gabi begins to clutch at her brutal lover, he begins to withdraw.
The movie, loosely adapted from Yehoshua Knaz's novel "Returning Lost Loves," tries to juggle too many characters at once (its title means "story plot" in Hebrew), and in several cases their connections aren't adequately explained. A builder, Ezra (Uri Klauzner), whose illegally employed Chinese assistants toil noisily and at all hours on an unlicensed expansion of the apartment into the courtyard, has a sullen cream puff of a son, Eyal (Amit Mestechkin), who deserts the army and hides out in the city's red-light district.
A stern ex-army officer, Ezra and his divorced wife, Mali (Hanna Laslo), clash bitterly about Eyal's cowardice. The father wants to disown him, but the mother is forgiving, and the surprise upshot of the boy's desertion is one of the story's unconvincing plot turns.
Disgustedly observing the chaos is Schwartz (Yosef Carmon), a doddering Holocaust survivor on the brink of senility, whose peace is shattered by the apartment's expansion. When that expansion hits a snag, he is deliriously happy, his faculties miraculously restored.
There really isn't a likable character in the movie, which opens today in Manhattan. The filmmaker's jaundiced view of humanity is matched by his eye for the ugly. This section of Tel Aviv is a place of dirt and mud and noise. Its physical desolation is matched by the insensitive behavior of characters hellbent on pursuing their personal agendas.
In the filmmaker's view of Tel Aviv (and perhaps of Israel in general), the social contract that gave birth to modern Israel is coming unraveled, and a desperate each-man-for-himself greed has taken over. A production note informs us that there are 300,000 illegal immigrant workers from Asia, Romania, Ghana and Nigeria in contemporary Israel. And the movie conveys the sense of Tel Aviv as the flashpoint for all this diversity.
Beneath the prevailing selfishness lurks the anxiety of living in a guerrilla war zone where news of suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism are reported matter-of-factly on the news all day, every day. If "Alila" shows a city teeming with life, it also suggests a place where no peace is to be had.
Directed by Amos Gitai In Hebrew, with English subtitles Not rated, 123 minutes
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/movies/27ALIL.html> *****
Cf. <http://www.kino.com/alila/> -- Yoshie
* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>
