"Couples therapy" makes sure to be quiet, inclusive, anti-sensational and anti-exploitative

The casting is not varied enough, there is often a sense of voyeurism, and the psychologist who wins over everything is far less impressive than the American original.

However, despite the reluctance, "Couples Retreat", the new docu-series of Here 11, takes care of the sensitive and delicate conduct, which makes it fascinating and touching.

Ido Yeshayahu

01/12/2021

Wednesday, 01 December 2021, 00:00

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A peek from "Couples Therapy" (here 11)

The last twenty years have shown us that psychological therapy can become a fascinating television. You don't even have to be a mobster in a mid-life crisis. It is also possible to be an athlete who has been in a car accident, a CEO with anxiety disorders or a couple with a crisis of confidence. Of therapist-patient confidentiality, as well as of the taboo under which couples do not reveal - neither to the world nor even to close friends and extended family members - everything that does not work in their relationship.We are all happy.Check out our Instagram for proof.

The excellent original American version of the docu-series - both seasons of which are fully available and highly recommended for viewing - introduced the concept: Clinical psychologist Orna Gorlanik, a former Israeli currently working in New York, works for six months with a number of different couples on regular dates.

Part of the power of the original series is the diversity in the casting of the couples.

It includes those who look more affluent and those who do not, heterosexual couples and same-sex couples, and in the second season there is even an ultra-Orthodox couple.

This heterogeneity allows us to get acquainted with a diverse life, introduces some memorable characters, and at the same time sharpens the message at the heart of "couple therapy": no matter what foreign and / or strange couple we face, in the end these are two people trying to live together. With mutual love and respect.

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Can be the neighbors.

"Couples therapy" (Photo: here 11)

This is something that is hard not to identify with, a universality that makes the format something to be imported, and so does here 11: The Hebrew version of "Couples Retreat" airs starting this week on Mondays and Tuesdays at 10:05 p.m. Gorlanik's place is taken by the psychologist Sharon Baram Wolowski, and the variety of the source is taken by couples who can be the neighbors of each of us. This is a point that manages to be both the advantage and the Achilles' heel of the Israeli adaptation.

In the first place, the local casting is less creative and therefore less interesting, and this is already the case with a psychologist who leads everything. There's something really unusual about Gorlnik. She gently isolates herself from the dynamics of the couple in front of her so that they can express themselves without dividers and obstacles, formulate things for themselves, before she herself provides them with her insights or leads them to them with questions. At the same time, Gorelnik always leans forward to the person in front of her, always seems interested, even alert for them, always somehow knows how to dig in the right place.

Baram Wolowski's approach is completely different.

The local psychologist is much less assimilated, does not allow things in the room to grow on their own, but formulates regularly and directly the problem of the patients and their relationship, sometimes while they themselves are still talking.

Most of the time she seems to have a kind of all-knowing arrogance, and for the patients she may really be like that - more than once in the first three episodes sent for review, one of them tells her that she phrased exactly the matter.

Only when she herself consults with Prof. Moshe Almagor Tikotsky, her mentor in the series (another question from the original format), is there - from time to time - more humility and mental reckoning about how the treatment is done and what is done or not done in it.

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Much less assimilated.

"Couples therapy" (Photo: here 11)

As for the patients - there are four such couples this season, which will number 12 episodes, all heterosexual, all, with the naked eye, as if they came out of a uniform production line of an Israeli couple. If there is diversity, it lies in the nuances between the lines (and the lines refer to the series summary, because "couple therapy" itself does not really establish them throughout the first quarter of the season): couple health, socioeconomic status and the places the couples came from - deaf religious, doctor and hitchhiker From the north and so on.

However, as evidence of the strength of the format, none of the reluctance and hesitation really diminishes the power of "couple therapy."

The sessions in the series are filmed by hidden cameras in a set built specifically for this purpose, ones that dominate the room on all sides without either being seen by the other, and most importantly - without the participants feeling them, allowing themselves to be freer and more natural as in regular therapy.

The cameras are not anchored but are constantly moving, can focus on subtleties, whether plans or aesthetics - and "couple therapy" is definitely aesthetic.

There is an abyss between her and a "family connection", if anyone still wants to mark a pioneer.

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In exposed nerves.

"Couples therapy" (Photo: here 11)

This arrangement contributes to the most important element in the nature of “couple therapy”: sincerity. Some of the couples who come to her, from the very first second we see them, do so with bare nerves and a trembling voice. And due to its transgressions, the Israeli version often gives a feeling of voyeurism. We are not supposed to see these hidden secrets. But "couple therapy" does not squeeze a liter of tears from its protagonists and the situation. She does not make close-ups of crying faces, she does not have the automatic piano items that start whenever a "exciting" moment arrives and is so kind to Israeli reality shows, such as the huge hit from the neighboring channel where even couple therapies are a big component of DNA. Necessary: ​​Even so, these are dramatic moments, perhaps even mountains of fate, for these people.

"Couples therapy" makes sure to be quiet, inclusive, anti-sensational and anti-exploitative.

The appearance of ordinary couples - a kind of Israeli stanza - works in this framework with tremendous courage, mentally naked, sometimes shattered, poses a mirror image of marital difficulties wherever they are.

And if at times a sense of intrusion into privacy arises, it dissolves quickly through a soft and compassionate description, whose very delicacy yields heartbreaking moments.

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