TEL AVIV ON FIRE
Israel/Luxembourg , 2018, 100 minutes, Colour.
Kais Nashif, Lubna Azabal, Yaniv Biton, Nadim Sawalha.
Directed by Sameh Zoabi.
Somebody remarked that this was a soap opera about a soap opera. It is an Israeli production but was filmed in Sound Studios in Luxembourg and was nominated for consideration for the Academy Award by Luxembourg.
The film is very much for an Israeli audience, for an Arab audience. The setting for the television program, Tel Aviv on Fire, a month prior to the set Six Day War of 1967, a spy, to be played by an imported actress from Paris, and her lover, his getting her a different identity card, her working for an Israeli general, to seduce him and get his secrets.
However, though there are financial backers, the series is being written on the run, an elderly uncle using and drawing plotlines from American movies like The Maltese Falcon and Hitchcock’s notorious. His nephew, rather a sad sack type in love with a nurse from the hospital, is employed because of his knowledge of Hebrew for those aspects of the dialogue. The jokes about translation will be lost on those who don’t speak Hebrew.
In fact, much of the atmosphere of the comedy will be lost on audiences outside Israel and Palestine, very topical, farcical situations but also some very serious situations.
The best part of the comedy is that the nephew is held up at a checkpoint (and visitors to Israel will be familiar with the brusque and sometimes brutal behaviour of the soldiers at checkpoints with their guns) and is interrogated by the official whose wife is a great fan of the television series. What happens is that the official becomes very interested, contributing plot developments in character, doing deals with the writer, demanding a wedding at the end, the writer bringing him boxes of hummus.
Then, there are the discussions with the uncle, with the financial backers, with the main screenwriter, with the French actress who has a tantrum when her character suddenly develops cancer and wants to return to France, the timing, the discussions, some of the preposterous ideas, the Israeli official wanting a wedding, taking the writers identity card to have a hold over him…
The film was released in 2018, after the earlier intifada but before the tragic events of 2023 and the home us massacre of Israelis and the consequent horrors of the war and attack on Gaza and the consequent family.
(All the bloggers on IMDb a very favourable – reviewers outside Israel and Palestine, not so.)
