Désengagement

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.

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.

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.

Saw this on cable and it caught all of our attention immediately. The raw emotion of it will not let you stop watching it. You cannot help but put yourself into the plight(s) of this movie. I would recommend watching it if you are at all curious. Juliette is always captivating and very much so in this film. You get to see things in Israel how they happened with the plight of the settlers and the inside police view. It is a different perspective to present since it is kind of an inside view of the circumstances. This movie is OK for kids and adults to view in our opinion. It may bore the kids though... Some of this is subtitled and some is in English. Enough of English so that it keep our families attention since subtitled doesn't seem to go over.

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.