French movie, Israeli movie

Some spoilers here...

Having a bit of a run on movies worth mentioning at the moment. In the last few days we've seen the Israeli film, The Lemon Tree and the French movie, The Big Picture (L'homme qui voulait vivre sa vie, which translates roughly as 'the man who wanted to live his life').

The French movie was well made, but left you with a rather flat feeling: it comes to a sudden halt at a point which could be said to be showing something of an epiphany in the main character's life, but it's very understated. Paul (Romain Duris) is a youngish man with a wife and two children, and a good job in a legal firm which it's likely he can take sole charge of soon: the co-owner (Catherine Deneuve) has learnt that she hasn't long to live. Somehow Paul manages to throw all this away, partly because of misunderstandings, partly because of not being able to talk sensibly to his wife, and partly because she's having an affair and he accidentally kills her lover. But no one else finds out about this. He makes it look as though the lover has gone away. And then he fakes his own death.

There are lots of plot-holes, as my friend calls them, lots of improbabilities. Paul is supposed to be a somewhat impetuous character, but he somehow meticulously plans not only how to get rid of the lover's body, but how to make himself vanish. Other unexplained matters irritate, such as how he manages to live without work by using only cash for several months after the events described above. The piece is slow in its first half-hour, and then after the lover's death it picks up, but there are still too many shots of Duris brooding. After a while you just wish he'd get on with things...

The Lemon Tree moves along quietly, but it has an intense performance at its centre: Hiam Abbass (an Israeli actress) plays a Palestinian widow, Salma, whose sole income is from a lemon tree orchard that is situated inconveniently on the border, right next to a house just taken over by the Israeli Defence Minister, his wife, and entourage. The security people advise cutting down the trees so that there's a clear view across the land; Salma, of course, is appalled at their arrogance, and fights for her rights.

The Defence Minister is a jerk, of course, but his wife sees through the situation a little more clearly, and after a lot of internal debate manages to do the right thing. Unfortunately it's rather too late, and the film has a bittersweet ending.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this movie is that it's been made by Israelis, and yet the Israelis are the baddies/villains/whatever. Only the Defence Minister is really bad news, in the sense that he's juggling every ball possible at the same time; most of them come crashing down before the movie ends. His wife becomes increasingly sympathetic to the widow's situation as the movie goes on, but between her hands being tied, and her lack of will to do something to change things, she fails the widow, effectively. There are some unpleasant people on the Palestinian side, of course, most notably the 'elders' who, instead of aiding the widow, want to push her down even further. There are a lot of Biblical parallels in the movie: those who are supposedly acting righteously but not caring for the widows, for instance, and Ahab taking over his neighbour's vineyard. Salma, however, is a tough woman, and she doesn't let things knock her down completely, though there are plenty of knocks along the way.

Bad and goodel

Last night we watched an Israeli movie, supposedly a comedy, about a trio of geriatrics who try to rob a bank, with the aid of the grandson of one of them. Sir Patrick Stewart (as he's listed on the cover) was one of the trio; the other two were Hebrew actors. For some reason crudity was the order of the day, along with a good deal of swearing. Which always seems worse when it appears as a subtitle. (We watched the awful Gone Girl recently with subtitles, because the dialogue was so hard to hear you wondered if they'd purposely been told to mumble most of the time. That dialogue was even more full of four-letter words - the whole range - and was really off-putting.)

The Israeli movie was called Hunting Elephants and was total nonsense, offensive to women, and filled with male characters obsessed with sex. Rubbish. Sir Patrick, curiously enough, played an actor down on his luck, who, when we first saw him, was in an abysmal production of Hamlet done with Star Wars characters. It seemed an unlikely piece for a supposedly good actor to appear in; Hunting Elephants also seemed like an unlikely piece for a very good actor to appear in.

Tonight we watched a French comedy, My Best Friend (Mon Meilleur Ami), about a man who's so involved with his own life and what he wants that he suddenly realises he has absolutely no one to share anything with, no one he can call his best friend. Furthermore he's divorced, the woman he sees regularly has had enough, and his daughter doesn't even call him Dad. As the result of a bet he makes with his female business partner, he has to produce his 'best friend' in ten days. He discovers that the best friend isn't that hard to find, but he is hard to keep, especially if the main character wants to carry on living the way he has been doing.

Daniel Auteuil plays the self-centred main character gradually warming up from frozen, and Dany Boon is the taxi-driver who seems to have more friends than he knows what to do with. It's an odd couple movie, I guess, but it's played beautifully, is never over-the-top, and is full of charm. There's only one swear word in it, and the character apologises for saying it. And it's funny.

Both Auteuil and Boon are actors who seem very familiar from other movies, yet nothing that's listed on IMDB means a thing to me. Perhaps they just look like a lot of other French actors...

The Band's Visit

I caught up with the charming movie, The Band's Visit, the other day.   It's an Israeli-made film, but its focus is on a number of Egyptian characters, the members of the Alexandria Ceremonial Police Orchestra, who find themselves lost, and somewhat at sea, in a little Israeli town they've arrived at by mistake.   A confusion over the sounds, P and B, hasn't helped.   The Orchestra, with its odd combination of instruments, seems unlikely to make much of an impact on anyone or anything, since it consists of so few people - eight or nine in all.  And during the course of the movie, when we hear one or two of them playing (the clarinettist, for instance, who presents the page or so of his unfinished concerto, and the trumpet player - who also doubles on the violin) we think they're not going to impress anyone.   But at the end of the movie, they come together for their concert (in the right town) and are superb.  They need each other to perform their best.

Sasson Gabai

The film, while it's about music and its effect on people, is more focused on relationships.  It doesn't primarily set out to tell us we should all love one another, and that Israelis and Arabs should just get along, though it does achieve this as a by-product.  It's about resolving things from your past, and being honest and open.  In other words, it's a film about real - and delightful - people.  The 'messages' come naturally with the content of the story.

The casting is superb.  The orchestra's conductor is played by Sasson Gabai, who was born in Baghdad of Israeli-Iraqi parents.   He's a withdrawn person who finds it difficult to communicate directly with anyone - though he does come alive when conducting, which is perhaps why he never lets his next-in-charge take over the role.   In the little town he meets Dina, the owner of a small cafe.  She's played with wonderful fire and life by Ronit Elkabetz.  Dina seldom minces matters and her up-front honesty eventually breaks through to the conductor and allows him to tell her what little we need to know about him to understand him.

The youngest member of the band, the trumpet/violin player, Khaled, is played by Saleh Bakri, a Palestinian who was born in Jaffa, and now lives in Haifa.   He seems to be out of place in this group of middle-aged and older men, and certainly he gets under the skin of the conductor more than a little.  However, he's the one who is prepared to make the most of life, and who can encourage others to do so.  In one of the film's most delightful scenes he shows an unconfident and scruffy young Israeli how to court the woman he's been landed with in a blind date.  The interplay between the three actors has to be seen to appreciate the subtleties and humour.

The film doesn't just show everyone as being happy about the situation.  One of the unemployed young men who hangs out at Rena's cafe takes three of the bandsmen home with him, much to the annoyance of his wife and her mother.  They remain intransigently opposed to these visitors, undercutting the Jewish ideals of hospitality in no small measure.  Only the young man and his father-in-law respond positively to the three bandsmen.  In a later scene we discover that the young man is the father of a baby, who's sleeping in a cot in his room.  We don't know whether this is why his wife is at such odds with him, or whether it's because he can't find a job, or whether it's because they're stuck in this awful town  - and it is awful: Rena shows the conductor the 'park.'  It has no grass, no children's play equipment, nothing.  The streets are bare, and the landscape barer.  The roller-skating rink is half-empty, and even those who are there seem lacking in much energy.

But this gloomier section of the movie can't undermine the joy that's apparent in much of the rest of it.

Apropos of my comment about the mix-up over P and B in Arabic and Israeli, in the last two or three weeks my wife and I have been learning Arabic.  (There's a reason, but I won't go into that at the moment.)  Pizza is bizza in Arabic, and potatoes are bitatis, so we were already aware of this confusion when we saw the movie.  In fact we got the movie out of the Library in part because it was in Arabic and we wanted to hear people speaking the language.  As it turned out, of course, it's only partly in Arabic.  The Jews speak Israeli, and when the Arabs and Jews speak to each other they mostly use English!

I was thinking about this because of the brand name, Vater Drums, which I came across today.  Vater is the German word for Father, and in German/English there are a number of corresponding words that are virtually identical apart from the F/V substitution.  Years ago I did a course in England that showed how many words had connections between the two languages.  Unfortunately someone borrowed the notes I'd been sent by the person who wrote the course, and I never saw them again.  And so far I haven't found anything similar on the Net.

Vater percussion accessories are big time, apparently, though not to me.  Although I've been around percussion players and drummers a good deal over the years, I've never paid much attention to the brand names on their instruments, although I know that these instrumentalists are very aware of the better brands.  Vater produce accessories for drums: the sticks, the mallets, brushes, etc, rather than the drums themselves.  And they make the holders as well, along with holders for the all-important drink bottle!