In Avi Nesher's warm and humorous film, very British Indians settle in a dry town near the desert and must learn to cope with their French speaking Moroccan neighbors. That they are all Jews helps little; there are major differences in language, customs, and attitudes. Set in 1968 and narrated by Sarah, the teenage daughter from Bombay, the film deals gently but genuinely with the problems of adolescent angst as well as more serious issues of struggling immigrants dumped by the bureaucracy in a remote border town. Despite the insistence of Nicole, Sarah's friend and the sixteen year old town beauty, that nothing locally is worth chronicling, the film is particularly adept at depicting the greatest passions in the most ordinary people. Though the narrator is not always aware of it, there are love affairs, labor unrest, tragic illness, jealousies, and other personal dramas. The larger issues include a strike at the bottling plant, the town's only employer, and a visit by the championship cricket team, arranged by the British consulate. Although the Moroccan Jews initially jeer this "child's game," they eventually join the Indian ex pats for the match, with predictably hilarious and disastrous results. By the time adulthood arrives with the girls receiving their notice for the Army, we have a sense how new Israelis are formed from their varied ethnic backgrounds.
Nesher's casting is impeccable, down to the smallest role. Particularly wonderful is the way he matches the tall, statuesque Moroccan wife with her short, older, balding husband, and makes their caring relationship totally believable. The fact is that all the characters are memorable, from the sexy widow upstairs, to the handsome Indian dance teacher, to the Tel Aviv poet, teaching high school in the desert. Despite its mixture of spoken Hebrew, English, French, pidgin, and gestures, the excellent subtitles manage to convey even puns effectively. This polyglot of languages, as the clashing customs, reminds us just how very diverse Jews are, how the cultures of their birth countries create a Jewishness that is never monolithic, until, perhaps, it is transformed into "Israeliness."
