Kesef Kal

Facing Tel Aviv's inflated housing prices and having little to invest, a couple settles for a tiny house in need of fixing up. A sharpster-- one of many in the seedy neighborhood-- advises them that rather than living in the place, they could do better by subdividing it and renting it out. This seems to set up the adventure that will carry us through the movie with the couple as protagonists, but they turn out to be merely secondary figures. That's the first of a number of clever strokes of scriptwriting here. Unfortunately, the movie is marred by cheap overemphasis on many of the gags. Mugging, musical effects, and sound effects degrade the humor distractingly. There are also a couple of scenes that step into fantasy or surrealism, and I think they were a questionable idea because the whole movie is on the edge of fantasy anyway. Underneath all the schtick is some telling social satire, but in order to appreciate it you have to forgive a kind of nonsense reminiscent of the notorious Israeli "burekas" school of comedy.