Budapest Israeli Film Week Wrap
By Alex Cousy Deleon
Apparently about basketball, but not really …
There were altogether some fourteen films programmed in this overview of recent Israeli films, however, due to overlapping scheduling at the Puskin Art Mozi it was not possible to get to them all. One or two that looked particularly enticing were missed. What films were seen indicate that the Israeli film industry is thriving, loaded with talent, entering into many co-productions to expand productivity, and forging full steam ahead. The last film I managed to get to was the following.
Playoff 2011 director Eran Riklis is also the director of The Syrian Bride and Lemon Tree, two of the highest profile Israeli films at festivals and generally during the past dozen years.
This latest Riklis effort, ( # Editor note below) filmed entirely in Germany with non-Israeli actors, featured American actor Danny Huston as “Max Soller” a legendary Israeli basketball coach of German origin, who returns to the country he fled 39 years before, to coach a stumbling German basketball team.
What appears to be a film about basketball is only obliquely that.
This is basically a pretext to look into the painfully unclear history of Soller’s Jewish family under Naziism and leads to unpleasant discoveries and a confrontation with an unreformed ex-Nazi colleague.
He coaches this second rate team with something like a feeling of vengeance often referring to a book, the cover of which we see several times, significantly — the autobiography of legendary Boston Celtics NBA coach Red Auerbach who was very definitely Jewish and made no bones about it. And Soller makes no bones about claiming that Auerbach is his role model in life. One important subplot is his antagonistic relationship with a rebellious young German player. We see a few hardwood clips but not very much as the Playoff in this picture is more about his confontation with his past than with the other teams. At the end we are informed that the team he was coaching came in at a not very rousing eighth place in the 1984 German basketball league playoffs.
The film is beautifully lensed, especially in the countryside scenes, but is not terribly gripping like Mr. Riklis’ previous successes. A thread of romantic tension is supplied by a very attractive Turkish woman who is befriended by Soller and is having problems with her residence status in Germany. This turns into a real teaser when she strips and offers herself to him, but he has too much on his mind to accept her nearly unrefusable offer.
The suffocation of pent up emotions or something like that. The woman incidentally is played my mixed Kurdish-English ancestry actress Amira Casar, best known for her ravishing central role in Catherine Breillat’s hardcore sex opus “The Anatomy of Hell”, 2004 (Ed: And Call Me by Your Name (2017), The Last Summer of the Rich (2014) and La vérité si je mens!(1997, She is the daughter of a Kurdish father and a Russian opera singer).
Mr. Huston, son of legendary Hollywood director John Huston and half-brother of Angelica Huston, is on screen most of the time and is given innumerable facial closeups to reveal his sensitivity and inner conflicts.
The problem is that Huston, while he does turn in a reasonably sensitive performance, does not exactly have the kind of A-level actor face we want to spend that much time examining in intimate microscopic detail. Huston does seem to have a certain appeal for Israeli directors as he also had a fairly large part in Ari Folman’s astounding sci-fi mystifier, The Congress. The only thing about this picture that was Israeli was the director, and the background fact that the central protagonist is based on a real life Israeli Sportsman, although portrayed here by a non-Jewish actor in English.
Overall, interesting to watch but nothing to write home about.
Amira Casar with her exotic beauty IS worth writing home about!.
Red Auerbach’s autobiography is seen in the film
18.12.2016 | ALEX FARBA’s blog
Cat. : FESTIVALS.
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#Editor: Actually this is not Eran Riklis’ latest. Since 2011 when he made this, he has made
- Spider in the Web (now in post-production)
- 2017/VI Shelter
- 2014 Love Letter to Cinema
- 2014 Dancing Arabs
- 2012 Zaytoun
