Review by nurit-horak

"Saving Neta" (2016) is an Israeli film that describes the story of one man through the story of the four women he meets during the film. These women each in her turn change the story of Netta and influence him. "Saving Neta" is an interesting film in terms of Bechdel test, since it is a film that very easily, without trying to "think" about it too much, to process it or emphasize it, passes the test in the first few minutes. As such, it is one of the few (if any) Israeli films that I can think of that "solves" the problem so easily and in fact does not treat it as a problem at all but rather as a self-evident norm. It is also probably one of the few Israeli films where the ratio between the number of actors and the number of actresses playing in it plays a significant difference in favor of the second. The film focuses on women and women's relationships with one another. Mothers and daughters, spouses and sisters, lovers, etc. The film opens in its first few minutes in a conversation between three women who do not deal with a man but with the daily plans of those women and it is full of such conversations. It seems that the women of "saving Netta" are busy all the time. The talks between them are about a military course, car repairs, a family picnic, mourning and pregnancy. They are constantly active and need to function in their relationship with each other or in the role that the society has set for them (a military commander or a woman in a lesbian relationship who is chosen to bear the children). In contrast, Neta is a wanderer, Between the various episodes in the film, he does not do anything other than "flow" and mourn lost connections. In this sense, the film's script gives more freedom to its masculine character than to the female characters who are always committed to something or to someone. All the female characters try to fight the commitments that the society or those around them have imposed on them and fail again and again. The "successful" women, in the film's last story, is a woman who insists on having her retarded sister put in an institution after the death of their mother and provokes anger and rejection from the viewers. This is probably the strong statement of the film and not the private story of Neta himself.