GOLO EULER AND NETA RISKIN IN ANYWHERE ELSE


No geographical solution for ex-pat Israelis?

The best sequence in this hard-working but ultimately somewhat inconsequential film comes over three quarters of the way in, when the heroine's brother, who's AWOL from the Israeli army, and her German boyfriend, who's paid an surprise two-day visit to Israel, go off by each other for an hour or two on a party night, swim in the ocean, exchange clothes, and tease each other a little, smoking dope, drinking bear, and speaking English. For a moment Amrami sets aside her agenda and throws two of her characters together randomly and sees what might happen. Not much, maybe, but it seems real. These are two equally out of place and uncertain young men momentarily sparring -- and connecting.

Everything else is all too well defined, as may befit a young Israeli woman working (on a doctorate, about untranslatable words) who, like Amrami herself, is an Israeli living in Germany. In the film, Noa's thesis either isn't going well, or at least potential sponsors have refused to give funding. This in itself is a confusion in the writing: Is the thesis good, or not? We keep seeing brief videos Noa (Neta Riskin) has made of a Russian, a Syrian, a Brazilian, and others explaining, in German, a word in their native language that they miss because there's no word for it in German. Noa's boyfriend, Jörg (Golo Euler), is a tall, strapping redheaded German trombonist, not Aryan, maybe, but so clearly un-Jewish that when he pays a suprise visit to Tel Aviv following upon Noa's surprise visit there, the police are very suspicious. The message is driven home that anyone who's not an Israeli in Israel, or at least Jewish, is suspected of being a terrorist.

Noa is on a brief escape from the cold and damp of Germany and her uncertain future there for the putatively consoling gemütlichkeit of her very Jewish Israeli family. But that coziness quickly turns sour along all-too-predictable lines: the sourpuss sister Netta (Romi Abulafia) who hates her, the soldier brother, Dudi (Kosta Kaplen), who hates the army, the father, Yossi (Dovaleh Reiser), obsessed with building a rocket shelter in the back yard, the nutty Holocaust survivor grandmother from Poland, Henja (Hana Rieber), who only speaks Yiddish. None of this has emotional resonance, even when grandma starts dying. It's not a good sign that the strongest character is the kvetching, controlling mom, Rachel (Hana Laslo), who, -- who would have guessed? -- wants Noa to marry a nice Jewish doctor, Yoav (Dedi Amrami)! To round things out there's a Latina member of the family, Rose (Alma Ferreras), who can read Hebrew but mostly speaks English. She reads the paper but she tells Jörg it always says the same thing. Ouch! Some of Amrami's comments are not too subtle.

Jörg stays with Noa's family, never a good idea in such situations, and the claustrophobia that results has comedic possibilities that slip away. Which brings us to Dudi, Noa's AWOL brother, and his evening with Jörg. After this episode, the death of grandma is a helpful device to pump up the emotional volume and provide a sense of an ending, throwing Noa and Jörg, whose relationship already wasn't going well when Noa took her quick run to Tel Aviv, back together, if only temporarily.

Noa's flight to Israel is dealt with so rapidly in the film you might think it was meant as comedy: she gets into a taxi in Germany, and then gets out of a taxi with Hebrew on it, walks to the sidewalk and finds her mother and Hey presto! has zipped from Berlin to Tel Aviv in twenty seconds.

Though this film feels somewhat sketchy, or sitcom-ish, it's still a young expatriate's serious look back at the Israeli homeland from the perspective of a German resident. There are some pointed observations: the brother's dismissive comment to Jörg that the whole Arab-Israeli thing is, in historical terms, not even a footnote, just barely "a comma"; the strange tableau of a loud alarm sounding on veterans day and everybody getting out of their cars and standing at attention; the sight of a young merrymaker in the evening pacing the street draped full length in an Israeli flag. But Amrami doesn't seem ready to make much of the perspective these details suggest.

The diagnosis of Variety's Jay Weissberg, who reviewed this Youth Prize-winning film in February at the Berlinale, is "An enjoyable but slight drama that only fitfully lives up to its promise." He's certainly right on that and on a lot of other things, besides listing the untranslatable words, giving the appropriate Yiddish terms for the family members' roles and personalities, noting the value of Riskin's wisdom in playing Noa as rough and unappealing at times; and acknowledging that Hana Lazlo is the strongest actress, however stereotypical she is as the mother. He's also right that Jörg and Noa could have had stronger chemistry. He's a bit unfair in declaring Golo Euler colorless. He just seems bland when surrounded by all those Jewish drama queens jostling for position. He's more than a head taller than all of them, and that sets him apart as much as he can be with his underwritten part.

Amrami is trying to do too much here, and not coordinating everything. As Weissberg noted, she hit on something fascinating -- he calls it "brilliant" --though maybe hard to fit into an academic "scientific" format. This is the idea of studying words people miss from their own language when living in another culture. But this is a metaphor thrown out and not connected to the main action, or to Noa's dilemma. The implications of place and displacment, not to mention the potent chemistry of a contemporary German plunked down uninvited in the middle of a typical Israeli family, are never adequately developed. But there is interesting stuff here that with luck Amrami may develop further in another movie.

Anderswo ["Elsewhere"]/Anywhere Else, 84 mins., a first feature in German, Hebrew, Yiddish, and English which debuted at the Berlinale Feb. 14, 2014 and also showed in Karlovy in July. Reviewed on a screener as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, where it will be shown July 29 (Castro Theater, San Francisco) and August 6 (California Theater, Berkeley).


July 24-August 10, 2014

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.