Film Review: AntarcticaGay life in today’s Tel Aviv is better presented cinematically by the work of Eytan Fox than in this overpopulated, callow effort.Nov 13, 2008, 05:04 PM ET
On a blind date, Omer meets Danny (Yiftach Mizrachi), a sweet kid who happens to be living with Ronen and was once involved with Boaz (Ofer Regirer), another tireless sex machine whose standard line is “You know how many guys I bring back here?” It’s been three years since their encounter, but now Boaz wants to reconnect with Danny. And then there’s Omer’s annoying lesbian sister Shirley (Lucy Dubinchik) and her bar-owner girlfriend (Liat Ekta) and Omer’s pushy mother Shoshana (Noam Huberman), who’s blithely aware of her children’s sexuality and has no problem with it, but nevertheless despairs of their ever being happily gay and married. Got all that? In this film, which was something of a personal coming-out celebration, writer-director Yair Hochner seems to want to include everything he has ever experienced and everyone he has ever met, and the plethora of characters, plotlines and coincidences becomes confusing and numbing. He captures the Internet/cellphone-driven youthful nonstop energy of a city like Tel Aviv, with its ever-searching, never-content inhabitants, but the numerous characters merely begin to cancel each other out. And then there’s the wacky casting of a man in drag as Shoshana, camping it up in a caricature of Jewish motherhood to make even the late Shelley Winters seem a model of subtlety. There’s no onscreen explanation for this bizarre aesthetic choice, which just puts the viewer at a further remove from realistic engagement. (In interviews, Hochner has described the casting of Huberman, a prominent Israeli drag artist, as a tribute to Divine and John Waters.) The boys are all tall, slim, dark and comely and, frankly, a little hard to tell apart at times. The film strives to be an updated version of, say, Schnitzler’s immortal La Ronde, but offers no real fresh insights. The inclusion of an absurd alien-invasion event and the droning melodies on the soundtrack don’t help matters. Film Review: AntarcticaGay life in today’s Tel Aviv is better presented cinematically by the work of Eytan Fox than in this overpopulated, callow effort.Nov 13, 2008, 05:04 PM ET
In the Tel Aviv of Antarctica, everyone is looking for sex and/or love. Omer (Tomer Ilan) is a shy librarian about to turn 30 who really doesn’t fit into this instant-hookup gay landscape. His best friend is Miki (Yuval Raz), who’s indefatigably slutty and has just met Ronen (Guy Zo-Aretz), a journalist whose research into alien abductions brings him into contact with eccentric Matilda Rose (Rivka Neuman), who’s written a best-seller about such experiences.
On a blind date, Omer meets Danny (Yiftach Mizrachi), a sweet kid who happens to be living with Ronen and was once involved with Boaz (Ofer Regirer), another tireless sex machine whose standard line is “You know how many guys I bring back here?” It’s been three years since their encounter, but now Boaz wants to reconnect with Danny. And then there’s Omer’s annoying lesbian sister Shirley (Lucy Dubinchik) and her bar-owner girlfriend (Liat Ekta) and Omer’s pushy mother Shoshana (Noam Huberman), who’s blithely aware of her children’s sexuality and has no problem with it, but nevertheless despairs of their ever being happily gay and married. Got all that? In this film, which was something of a personal coming-out celebration, writer-director Yair Hochner seems to want to include everything he has ever experienced and everyone he has ever met, and the plethora of characters, plotlines and coincidences becomes confusing and numbing. He captures the Internet/cellphone-driven youthful nonstop energy of a city like Tel Aviv, with its ever-searching, never-content inhabitants, but the numerous characters merely begin to cancel each other out. And then there’s the wacky casting of a man in drag as Shoshana, camping it up in a caricature of Jewish motherhood to make even the late Shelley Winters seem a model of subtlety. There’s no onscreen explanation for this bizarre aesthetic choice, which just puts the viewer at a further remove from realistic engagement. (In interviews, Hochner has described the casting of Huberman, a prominent Israeli drag artist, as a tribute to Divine and John Waters.) The boys are all tall, slim, dark and comely and, frankly, a little hard to tell apart at times. The film strives to be an updated version of, say, Schnitzler’s immortal La Ronde, but offers no real fresh insights. The inclusion of an absurd alien-invasion event and the droning melodies on the soundtrack don’t help matters.
|
|||||
|
|
Get Box Office Alerts via Mobile
FREE Newsletters
Share on LinkedIn
|
||||||||
