everything happens in tel aviv / "NOTHING DISTINGUISHES THE PALESTINIAN JEWISH HUMOR"
Neutrality, said the philosopher, is a privilege for those who have already taken sides. Sameh Zoabi (Iksal, Israel, 1975) knows this. And he knows it because he has spent a lifetime explaining who he is, where he comes from and, even today, it is not completely clear. He is Palestinian, but he has an Israeli passport. He speaks both languages plus the required English after studying film at Columbia University. He was born in a town on the outskirts of Nazareth. His family instead of fleeing like so many others when the tanks entered in 1948, he stayed. And that made him be from there, despite being here. "You shouldn't confuse staying in the middle with being neutral," he warns. His latest (or second) film, Everything Happens in Tel Aviv, pauses to tell the great and eternal contemporary conflict in the Middle East and,Despite the tragedy in which it stands, it is comedy. And also hilarious.
“I imagine it is a universal constant that the best jokes are heard at funerals. I think of Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch or Charlie Chaplin , and they all share the survivor's sense of humor. The ghetto, in any of its forms, be it Jewish or Palestinian, prints character and produces an identical sense of humor , ” says Zoabi from Brooklyn by phone. He does it to erase borders, to eliminate prejudices and to end sentences made about where fiction begins and reality ends; on what is the limit that separates the deepest tragedy from the most sincere laughter. It is not neutrality, it is playfulness.
The film runs all (or almost) at a Ramallah border crossing. In the middle then. Every day the writer passes by accident of a fotonovela that imagines love affairs between Arab spies and Jewish generals. And there, at the check-point, he will establish friendship, or something similar, with one of the policemen (as well as a dedicated fan of the serial) who control the barrier. One is Palestinian and the other Israeli. The two separated by the harshness of the real and united by the folly of the fabulation. Or vice versa.
“I remember growing up with Egyptian soap operas, posters of my sisters by Julio Iglesias, and Rambo's VHS movies. All this too ridiculous not to leave a trace, "he comments to clarify the origins of an idea turned into revelation. The film was shot between Israel and Luxembourg with European capital at the same time that it was written in New York. And it feeds on this universal mix and in its delocalization (which is not neutral) it ends up acquiring full meaning. "Every time I get introduced to someone, the question arises: 'How do you think the conflict will end?' My answer is always the same: 'I don't know. Each day that passes is more like a soap opera, which never ends. And from there, everything else. Included Everything happens in Tel Aviv.
The true story of Kelly's band / An irresistible punk 'western'
Ned Kelly is not as famous here as Jesse James for the simple reason that he was born too far from Hollywood in Australia. Justin Kurzel ( Macbeth ) revives the antipode outlaw in Kelly's True Band Story with the explicit idea of transforming it into a modern, violent, sleepwalking myth. The story of the transvestite bandit, the story of the man who faced an army in armor, the story of the man who rebelled against his destiny ... suddenly acquires the character of a punk manifesto about something as elementary as the sense of the history or ownership of the stories.
Wish List / COMEDY AS PENANCE
Good intentions are carried by the devil. And lazy screenwriters. Álvaro Díaz Lorenzo insists on rowdy, televised and conjunctural comedy, but, at a distance from Los Japon or Señor, give me patience , the idea is not just to put the viewer before the challenge (or blackmail, depending on how you look at it) of laughing or opening up veins. Now, in The Wish List , there is reason. And that is not so much cancer as a cause for social mobilization, but also, as the brilliant spectacle of three actresses (María León, Victoria Abril and Silvia Alonso) as easy-going as they are unprejudiced. The rest, yes, more than silence, is just noise. And quite lazy.
Family members / ADOLESCENCE inside
Every stage of lack of definition or crisis is also one of adventure. And there, the need for a story that makes sense. Only fiction saves. This is how the Argentinean Mateo Bendesky understands it, that in The members of the family he ventures over the precipices that besiege two young people trapped in a journey to childhood that, by force, they must leave behind. Between the dream and something even vaguer, the director manages to compose a beautiful, suggestive, fun and indefinite tale, not exactly a fairy tale that equally refers to the mythology of adolescence as to the harshness of mourning. Strange, warm and inalienable.
Room 212 / the risk of being French
Christophe Honoré is French and, like any self-respecting French, from time to time he feels the need to make it clear. Between vaudeville, sexual farce, musical by accident and something much more elegant and vulgar at the same time (it is French, we said), the director builds in Room 212 a kind of magical dream around time and love. A couple (a brilliant Chiara Mastroianni and Benjamin Biolay) in crisis review (or almost) a whole life of pleasures and infidelities. All this from a neutral space or non-space safe from the passing of the years. At times dazzling, at times loading, always exhaustingly French.
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