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The stranger, the familiar and the ugly: three new films, and only from the Israeli hit we did not suffer
"Perfect Strangers" turns out to be a glimpse into the soul of Lior Ashkenazi and of Israeli society as a whole, "Last Night in Soho" is painted and tedious and "Black Box" is ant work that will bore the ants as well.
Reviews on three new movies
Tags
Perfect strangers
Lior Ashkenazi
Enlightened poetry
Edgar Wright
Ania Taylor-Joy
Trans Stamp
Yossi Marshak
Moran Atias
Hanan Savyon
Guy Amir
Rotem Abohav
Abby Greinick
Avner Shavit
Sunday, 14 November 2021, 01:54 Updated: 02:18
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Trailer for the movie "Perfect Strangers" (United King)
What do Turkey, India, South Korea, Russia, Germany, Vietnam, Israel and a dozen other countries have in common? Not much, apparently, other than the fact that they all produced their own remake of the Italian hit "Perfect Strangers." We already had a theatrical performance based on the film, and now it's time for the film adaptation, which came up here this weekend backed by a massive marketing and public relations campaign.
The Israeli adaptation retains the frame story of the Italian original: several bourgeois and bourgeois gather for a routine dinner, until one of the characters offers a game: everyone will place their mobile phones on the table, face up, and incoming calls and messages will be available to the public. It is easy to understand why this particular concept has become an international brand. In all the random states we have mentioned the subjects are compulsive towards their devices, which have become black boxes and Pandora’s boxes of their professional and private lives and of their hidden secrets.
Despite the twist at the end, which helps establish the programming of this generating event, “Perfect Strangers” has always been for me a completely absurd idea. Even as a disturbed fantasy, social experiment or game, it is hard to believe that anyone nowadays would agree to entrust his phone in this way, and the film is devoid of any logic.
If we put it aside, then as what it is, "perfect strangers" turns out to be effective and sweeping entertainment.
Behind the camera was Lior Ashkenazi, in his first film as a director, and you can not feel his inexperience.
He controls matters with a confident hand, is good at creating tension and navigates the characters and dialogues like a polished captain.
The prolific actor this time settled for the director’s hat, recruiting an impressive bunch of actresses and actors, experienced but not disgusting.
Moran Atias, for example, has so far played mostly overseas;
Hanan Savyon and Guy Amir starred mainly in films they themselves directed;
Shira Naor has previously starred primarily on television;
Avi Gernik has been doing his significant cinematic role here since "Tears Flow by Themselves" twenty-six years ago, and neither Yossi Marshak nor Rotem Abohav suffer from cinematic overexposure.
Either way, everyone is excellent.
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Experienced and not disgusted. Enlightened poetry from "Perfect Strangers" (Photo: David Scurry)
Also because of copyright issues, the film replicates the characters, plot twists and dialogues of the Italian original, almost one by one.
It also has almost no local social or topical context - there is no arguing here about Corona or the election, for example.
But it still has one Israeli twist: it turns out that the host, played by Yossi Marshak, suffers from post-trauma following his military service, after his life was miraculously saved and another soldier died in his place.
Since we are in Israel, everyone knows everyone, and over time it becomes clear that the other people present at the meal were also affected by this death.
Thus, from a mere copy of the Italian original, "Perfect Strangers" becomes a film about the place of trauma and bereavement in Israeli society.
It is also interesting to note that the story he presents corresponds with the background story of the character played by Lior Ashkenazi in "Foxtrot", the role he himself defined as difficult and challenging in his roles, perhaps because he himself went through difficult experiences in his military service.
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As an actor and now also as a director, Lior Ashkenazi is one of the main figures in contemporary local cinema, and his first film behind the camera is a fascinating glimpse into his psyche - and the Israeli psyche in general, which the ghosts of its wars haunt everywhere.
It is interesting to note that a Lebanese version of "perfect foreigners" is also expected to be released soon - another illustration that after all the wars, in the end both we and our neighbors are human beings who chat too much with their phones.
Soon in Lebanon.
From "Perfect Strangers" (Photo: David Scurry)
black mirror
"Last Night in Soho" is not based on one particular film, but quotes from a variety of films, and even in its case there are Italian influences - the sub-genre of Italian, violent and stylish horror thrillers that came out in the seventies and were known as Gialo films. Director Edgar Wright, who is a film mouse no less than a filmmaker himself, also cited other sources of inspiration, for example British classics from the 1960s, some also from the horror genre but some actually social dramas.
Appropriately, "Last Night in Soho" tries to combine genre making with a topical social statement. His protagonist is an orphan from a small town in England, who like many of her generation has nostalgic tendencies and a fondness for vintage. She is played by Thomasin Mackenzie, who broke out as the Jewish girl in "Jojo Rabbit" and has been seen everywhere ever since.
The village girl fulfills her dream and travels to the big city to study design.
Another dream comes true when she rents a small room in Soho, one of the most chic quarters in London, and then it's the turn of the biggest dream of all.
It turns out that in the 1960s, one of the most glittering and mythological periods in the city's history, lived in the same room a glamorous girl who made her first steps in the world of entertainment.
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The casting is successful, the film is not.
Anya Taylor-Joy in "Last Night in Soho" (Photo: Tulip Media)
Then magic happens. Like Cinderella, every night the village girl returns in time, enters the body of the glamorous girl and lives her life in the celebrating London of the sixties. But what begins as a dream, becomes a nightmare - it turns out that the young woman from the Sixties fell victim to the sexual predators that roamed the bohemia of that period, and these took advantage of her and her ambitions. Night after night, the film's protagonist discovers how dark the truth behind the glittering Soho myth is, and she refuses to let history repeat itself.
Wright broke out about a decade and a half ago with the zombie comedy "Dead on the Dead" and has since become a darling of the bronze, social media and festivals - this film, for example, premiered at the last Venice Film Festival. But despite the aura around him, he directs "Last Night in Soho" with a horribly rude hand. The audience does not get to enjoy here even a second of refinement or subtext. Already on her first taxi ride in London, for example, the protagonist encounters a monstrous taxi driver, who is shown in a cartoonish manner and also behaves this way.
This is one of the problems of the film.
He describes the disturbing men as monsters, and alongside them also takes care to present a character of a "good man", who happens to be a handsome guy with pleasant demeanor.
But reality has taught us that even such men may turn out to be dangerous predators, so this cartoonish representation is sinful to the truth.
The film has a host of other representation issues.
Already on the first day of design school, the protagonist meets the class queen, orphaned by her mother as well, who instead of empathizing with her treats her in a bullying way all the way through, thus allowing Edgar Wright to replicate the male fantasy of "Battle of the Cats".
Later, she will have a completely black and passive partner, whom the film treats lightly and not as a fig leaf.
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Maybe Soho is better in Rishon LeZion. From "Last Night in Soho" (Photo: Tulip Media)
In a relationship between the two, as in any other relationship here, sex is presented as a sickly and violent thing. "Last Night in Soho" produces an equation by interaction between a female body and any other body must be disastrous. In the end, the script also describes sexual trauma as something that just comes and goes, and is too short to list the rest of the scripting problems it has.
The workmanship is also lacking. Wright has won work here with two of the most prominent young actresses of our time - Mackenzie and Ania Taylor-Joy, the award-winning actress on "Queen Gambit." In addition, he also recruited Diana Rig and Terence Stamp, two legends of British cinema. But all of this is wasted on an ornate and paper-laden director, the most notable of which is the overuse of duplicates and mirrors. Is it really necessary to show time and time again how Mackenzie looks in the mirror and sees Taylor-Joy there? Okay, she's she is, we understood the passage after the first time.
Already in its early stages, "Last Night in Soho" becomes a major headache.
In addition to a movie mouse, Wright is also considered a music mouse and soundtrack wizard, but he has put together a banal and moldy list of songs here.
How unoriginal it is is evidenced by this fact: the film uses Patula Clark's "Downtown", making it the second to do so this week, following a "red message" that surfaced on Netflix.
The director claims to be a lead-through hipster with good taste, but in the end is not very different from the algorithm.
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Movie soundtrack
One could argue whether Wright chose to make a film in the spirit of the MeToo out of opportunism or a pure heart, and one could also argue whether the intention is important at all, but one thing is clear: the result is dismal, and no wonder it failed at the box office.
It probably won’t hurt the career path of the esteemed director, and certainly not that of Mackenzie and Taylor-Joy, and we’ll have to wait for the film industry to be educated to create a film that will address these sensitive and important issues more appropriately.
black box
The journey that began in Italy, continued to Israel and from there moved to England, we will end in France, with the thriller "Black Box" by Jan Gozlan, which aired with us this weekend.
Pierre Nini, one of the most prominent young actors in France, plays an aviation accident investigator who tries to understand what caused a plane crash of a leading company - and this, of course, tries to narrow his steps so that he does not discover the truth. The film, it seems, is based on a real disaster that happened on an Air France plane on its way from Brazil to France a dozen years ago, and is not recommended to watch if you are flying soon. The
despite being French, "black box" belongs to the American genre known as procedural. That is, movies or series that follow an investigation from beginning to end and through a lot of black labor and technical details. These are the rules of the game, but the film stretches the gray boundaries of the genre to the limit, and it would have been more appropriate to call it "Gray Box." He pokes at the details of the interrogation like a dove in a slice of bread, and so petty and exhausting,Until ants were bored of him too.
Even the ants will be bored.
From "Black Box" (Photo: Film Forum)
The specific details are surrounded by a pile of clichés when it comes to sub-character design.
This is how the film wastes the talents of Andre Dossoye, a veteran and senior actor in France, and even de la Lage, one of its leading actresses.
It lasts more than two hours and time passes slowly, as in a transatlantic flight.
There is no reason to recommend a "black box" and yet, if you watch it and succeed, you will get to the chilling end, which will also deter you from approaching aircraft in the next century.
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