Ba-rakia ha-hamishi

In 1962 novelist Rachel Eitan published her semi-fictional memoirs of the growing pains of a pubescent girl in an orphanage in British- controlled Palestine. Although she was not an orphan, with both parents still living, the protagonist, Maya, was sent to the orphanage with the help of some well-placed friends to alleviate the financial troubles of her father.

The time is 1944-1945, the last year of the Second World War, when the wartime alliance between the Jews of Palestine and the British was coming to an end. The former began amassing weapons for the coming conflict against the Arabs and the latter were busy confiscating these weapons and overall, making life generally miserable for the Jews.

The film touches upon those themes, as well as on the additional topics of Jewish women dating British soldiers, the exploits of the Lehi underground unit, known to the world as the Stern Gang, and the rise of parasitic, opportunistic entrepreneurs, looking to make a fast buck in the midst of those historic times. There is even an oblique look at the holocaust, in the (too shallow) presentation of the orphan girl "FROM THERE".

It seems fairly obvious that against such an historical and political background, the coming of age story is reduced to a bland, pale narrative. It does not help that the acting is so wooden, and that the heroine's face is reduced to an empty stare which does not register empathy with the viewer. Furthermore, the relations between the too-few orphans (I am certain the place was chock-full of orphans in those Holocaust days) is almost non-existent, and it is very hard to see how the newcomer has turned into the queen bee. Even the sexual awakening of the girls is presented in such an insipid way as to make it totally uninteresting.

I give this movie 5 stars for its overall look and feel, but as for being a coming of age story, we have seen much much better (400 Blows, for example).

Adapted from a book that in turn was adapted from the author's own early life at an orphanage in British Mandatory Palestine, this movie follows the progress of a preteen from new kid to queen bee. That's the underlying arc, but it's visited only occasionally as the movie spends a great deal of time on the adult characters. One of Israel's classic movies, The Summer of Aviya, was about a fatherless little girl who imagines a man living nearby must be her real father. In The Fifth Heaven, the author seems to have turned a similar childhood fantasy into part of the story, as the principal of the orphanage has trouble ignoring the possibility that he may be the little girl's biological father. Another orphanage worker is played by Rotem Zussman, who seems to get all the Israeli cinema's best supporting roles in recent years, or at least she makes them look like the best, and she has an Ophelia scene where she remarks about trees with no roots. That may be a symbolic reference to the community around her, as almost everyone seems to be a refugee from somewhere and the orphans are certainly rootless. Whether there is broader, even political symbolism intended I couldn't say, but there is certainly a depiction of the political and social tension between the violent and nonviolent approach to achieving independence for Israel. I wasn't around at that time of history, but the script-- helped by the props and the award-winning costumes, although there are no street scenes-- seems like a credible snapshot from 1944-1945.