Disengagement

The excellent Israeli director Amos Gitai has used this time a script to provide a vehicle for great names like Juliette Biboche, Barbara Hendricks, Jeanne Moreau, but has little to do with any real situation. An Israeli policeman travels to Avignon to attend the funeral of his stepfather. He sleeps on the street amid the homeless but wears a suit for the funeral! His beautiful step sister Ana who has not seen her daughter since early childhood and has not kept any contact with her, discovers that the daughter lives in a settlement in Gaza. Quite strange, the late father of Ana did visit his granddaughter occasionally! Instantly Ana travels to Gaza, succeeds to penetrate the sealed-off territory from which religious settlers were to be evacuated and wanders amid these settlers until she founds her daughter. The film has some beautifully filmed moments depicting the confusion, religious frenzy of settlers and cold blood of the policemen involved, but otherwise is very close to the usually sold kitch.

Maybe it's fashionable for people to listen to paint drying whilst off their heads on cocaine these days; it's the only reason I could think that would make this movie even tolerable. Boring disconnected dialogues, focussing on the irrelevant whilst skimming through what should be important plot elements (for the little plot that there actually is).

In a nutshell, this movie is the visual equivalent of really bad elevator music - something that leaves you feeling like your senses and your time have, wondering how you allowed yourself to be exposed to it.

In Avignon, Ana (Juliette Binoche) is a flighty woman estranged from her husband. Her father lies in state. She's overjoyed when her adopted brother Uli joins her at the funeral. They try to forge their father's will. The attorney dismisses their forgery and produces the real will. It states that Ana must reconnect with her daughter whom she abandoned in a Gaza kibbutz as a teenager. She arrives just as the authorities are schedule to take down the Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip.

First, it takes a long time for the drama to start. It's not until the reading of the will after forty minutes that the drama really gets going. Before that, it's a slow meandering story. It's also a weird way to get at the Gaza issue. It seems a side entry into this important issue. Once there, it does some interesting things.

For an Amos Gitai film, I thought this had the most impactive prologue amongst those that I've watched to date, which succinctly sums up the political themes that his films often explore. While it might have thrusted you right into the thick of (in)action, you'll soon realize that he has a tremendous ability to gift wrap his points amongst the most mundane and ordinary.

A Dutch-Palestinian lady gets chatted up by a French Israeli man on a train. They share a cigarette moment, and soon realize that they have a lot more in common than they initially realized. The two strangers's chance meeting soon turn into lust/love at first sight, probably a nod in the direction that even amongst what would be perceived as the most irreconcilable groups of people, can find common ground and understanding, and kiss and make up. Only that there are those in the world like the authorities wielding some power, could make unreasonable demands to try and derail peace efforts, like that train soldier who might have stepped out of his boundary in asserting and demanding that he be listened to and complied with.

Alas the movie failed to keep the pace with its wonderful opening, and for the most parts the build up to the finale sagged heavily under very dire straits stemming from an uninteresting plot which failed to capitalize on the Israeli man Uli (Liron Levo) whom we got introduced, but shifted its attention to the more illustrious Juliette Binoche's Ana, Uli's half sister whom he is meeting in France because of their father's demise, and to discover just what his will entailed. The story found it necessary to go through an entire backstory for nothing, only for us to know little red herring nuggets of information such as Ana's estranged relationship with her separated husband whom we do not see on screen, and that slightly incestuous (well, not exactly) temptations that both Uli and Ana go through, with the latter being the temptress.

It tried to address issues like staying with someone who you don't love, only out of convenience, which Ana confessed to be doing, because she's a lazy soul. But in fact her character flits into mood swings one end to the other, that it's not tough to understand how unappealing she can get, good looker or not. Things start to pick up slightly midway through the film when the actual seed of the story was sown, with the reading of the deceased's will, having to instruct Ana to travel to Gaza to pass on her dad's inheritance to her abandoned daughter Dana (Dana Ivgy) in person.

So begins a road trip for the siblings, which is convenient anyway because Uli was beginning to fade away like a side show, and his return to Israel gives him a chock load of things to do, since he's a police officer, and have been given orders, together with the army, to clear Gaza of its Israeli settlers since Israel has pulled out of the Gaza Strip. Ordering your fellow men off their plot of land and homes are never easy, and this story arc provides that "action packed"moment in Disengagement. The other thread would be of course Ana's quest in locating her daughter, like finding a needle in the perennial haystack, made more difficult because she doesn't speak the language of her countrymen. The story arcs tangent off at this point, but you know there'll definitely be moments for a collision course later in the film.

Through Uli's eyes we see how their evacuation operation gets carried out, having to be compassionate, yet stern in a thankless job that involves ejecting by any means possible the settlers who are protesting their rights. One involves grabbing the people and forcing them onto chartered buses to take them back to the mainland, and on the other having heavy machinery either bulldoze everything insight, or the utilization of cranes to literally lift homes off the soil. One can imagine if one is forced away from your home at the snap of a finger, and that is definitely something difficult to swallow.

Disengagement unfortunately is like a self-fulling prophecy, having the middle portion starkly dragging against the powerful prologue and finale. If only it could find a better gel to stick both ends together in a more engaging fashion.

The movie starts with a long conversation that seems written solely to enable a character to complain that the Arabs of Palestine are not recognized as a distinct nation although (contends this character, who is never seen again) they have been one for hundreds of years. It continues with a long interlude of existential/claustrophobic drama in a large house in Avignon occupied by the fresh corpse of an old professor, his frequently and unaccountably merry daughter, and his adopted son from Israel, with whom the daughter flirts. This interlude fails perhaps because the actors seldom have a line in their native language and therefore can't summon up the mojo to give the cryptic relationships interest. Then it appears that according to the old man's will, to which the daughter unsuccessfully tries to forge a change, the daughter must now go visit her own abandoned daughter who lives in Gaza in a Jewish settlement which the son already has military orders to coincidentally, at the very same time, go help dismantle. The dismantling of the settlement, re-enacted up the coast at Nitzanim, looks reasonably realistic, at least if you judge by the news footage of the time. A fairly large troupe of bit players does justice to the soldiers and the settlers, and the camera conveys the atmosphere well. As the old man's daughter meets her own daughter and they, at least briefly, lose one another again during the evacuation, is their relationship supposed to symbolize something about the political situation? Or vice versa? What do the scenes in Gaza have to do with the matters raised in the Avignon scenes? A viewer is tempted to think that perhaps Gaza was introduced for no reason but to link an otherwise boring and incomplete movie to a hot item from the recent news pages.