Refugiadas

Mossad agent Neta Riskin is sent to a Hamburg safe house to babysit Golshifteh Farahani. Fahahani is the former lover of a Hezbollah leader. She has been selling information to Israel for years. Now, however, she is pausing on a flight to Canada, while her plastic surgery heals, rendering her unrecognizable; as Miss Riskin's boss says, "We take care of our own." Yet as the two women wrangle, then ultimately bond, Miss Riskin begins to wonder who decides who "our own" is.

The, dreary world of grotty safe houses and betrayals that spy movies became after the 1960s "too cool for school" school triggered by the James Bond movies was a necessary corrective. Inevitably it got tangled up with the anti-government school of thought, leaving us with yet another subgenre that still needs its own corrections. This movie, well acted though it is, is shot in dreary light and despite good acting, seems to be more a matter of gender equality than seeking to tell a different story.

The first film that I viewed in 2018 in a pre-screening before the Israeli premiere was Shelter (original title 'Mistor'). It is directed by Eran Riklis, a director whose previous works The Syrian Bride and The Human Resources Manager I liked. Those were movies inspired by the Israeli reality, complex and emotional at the same time. The latest was based on a novel by A.B. Yeoshua. With Shelter Riklis tries a very different type of movie, a combination of psychological thriller and action movie, and the result was for me quite disappointing.

Yet, I can understand what intended Riklis with this story (he also wrote the script). The encounter between the Israeli Mossad agent and the Lebanese collaborator that she has the mission to defend while recovering from a plastic surgery that aims to change her physiognomy creates the premises of the meeting of two women who are separated by almost everything in their personal biographies and yet have so much to share as personal traumas. Women fighting in the secret wars have no easy time, and there is very little literature or film that dealt with these topic if at all. There is no feminine version of John Le Carre and of his heroes if you want.

While the intentions and premises are interesting, the execution lacks pace and the building of the relationship that is supposed to take place in the sheltering apartment in Germany is never credible on screen. I am not sure who is to blame for this, maybe more time should have been spent in the claustrophobic enclosure of the house and the inserts describing the menace closing on the two women could have been less or ignored at all. The two actresses (Neta Riskin and especially Golshifteh Farahani) do a reasonable job, but the chemistry that would have made their relationship credible is missing. The final quarter of the film switches pace and turns the whole story into an action movie, but lacks credibility. Psychological thrillers and action spy movies are two very different genres and their mixing does not work.

The film opens with a quotation from Kahlil Gibran. "Life is an island, rocks are its desires, trees its dreams, and flowers its loneliness, and it is in the middle of an ocean of solitude and seclusion." I'm not sure whether that's the exact translation used in the movie. Anyway, the movie shows us two women secluded in a lonely apartment for a good cinematic reason-- one is an agent assigned to keep the other one safe from the bad guys-- while each of them is intent on not only on surviving but on the goal of pursuing a purposeful parental relationship-- nurturing an island of life-- in the face of the ocean of nihilism symbolized by the betrayals and assassinations accompanying international espionage and terrorism.

Writer/director Eran Riklis compares the film to Bergman's Persona because of the intimacy and tension of the relationship between the two women, but I think a closer comparison might be with Coppola's The Rain People, where a woman unsure of herself as a future mother picks up a hitchhiker and finds herself receiving practice in the task of caring for another person.

When the movie ended, a woman in the theater asked me to take one side or the other in a debate with her friend over what actually had happened during the final minutes. The audience is indeed left with some bits to figure out, but I didn't feel seriously cheated. The production was professional, suspense was maintained continuously, and the music-- even if composer Yehonatan Riklis is, one might guess, some kind of relative of the director-- makes a fine, tasteful, enhancement.

Provided you don't go into this film expecting an action movie, most intelligent audiences should be satisfied.

Incredibly refreshing after most of the juvenile rubbish on Prime Video.

Fascinating, mature, great script and direction, wonderful performances. If you pay careful attention throughout you should in no way find the ending contrived, particularly if you have moderate knowledge of how Mossad are believed to operate (including compartmentalisation of knowledge).

I was mesmerized by this excellent drama.

I really tried to give this a good go but it's so badly produced, badly edited and combined with wooden acting, the film really had nothing going for it at all. It's like a film project that one might do for drama school. There was no compelling reason to continue to waste time watching it.