Israeli Media Reviews of Tel Aviv on Fire Movie
When a one-act is made well-nigh a real-life topic that is no laughing matter, it had better be funnier than Sameh Zoabi's "Tel Aviv on Fire." The premise is a richly flavorful one, but the execution is as bland as unseasoned hummus. Nosotros're not charmed or amused by the blundering choices made by our primal protagonist, we're just irritated by them. For a picture show sending up the contrivances of soap operas, it sure is susceptible to remaining inside the comfort zone of clichés itself, rendering its portrayal of the unscripted world practically indiscernible from the artificial one, salvage for a slight vaseline-similar sheen on the lens. Everything builds upwardly to a decision then underwhelming and anticlimactic, it left me feeling as if I had been strung along through a reasonably diverting serial only to exist abandoned in the season finale of "Game of Thrones," wishing badly for a rewrite.
Kais Nashif is an effortlessly natural role player, but he's all wrong for the role of Salam, a neurotic Palestinian would-be writer tasked with tweaking the Hebrew dialect on a hokey lather (sharing the film's championship), that has proven popular on both sides of the Israeli West Bank wall. Salam got the gig likely because his uncle, Bassam (Nadim Sawalha), is the testify's producer, who eagerly awaits the top-secret finale, which he has lifted from "The Maltese Falcon." The soap's honey triangle between a spy, Tala (Lubna Azabal), her Palestinian lover, Marwan (Ashraf Farah), and the Israeli general, Yehuda (Yousef Sweid), she aims to seduce, also appears to have been borrowed from some other Hollywood classic, Hitchcock's "Notorious," down to the use of a central as the MacGuffin. Nashif'southward affect is and then flat and insufficient of playfulness that his thickheaded moves verge on insufferable, such every bit when he asks a female edge patrol officer whether the discussion "explosive" is insulting when used to describe women.
To his inexplicable shock, he's ushered before the checkpoint's Israeli captain, Assi (Yaniv Biton), who changes his tone once he discovers that the dope works for his wife's favorite series. Salam then digs a deeper hole for himself by challenge that he writes the testify, a fib that gradually becomes fact when he starts incorporating Assi's story notes into script revisions, lending more than alleged believability to the role of Yehuda. Assi also yearns to make Yehuda a manlier beloved involvement for Tala, which would make her—and viewers similar the helm's wife—fall for him, while combating against the program'southward anti-Semitic characterizations. Why Salam feigns his writer status is a mystery, since he's so creatively bankrupt he can't dream upward dialogue without transcribing overheard conversations or baiting Assi with "Arab hummus" in order to continue their secret collaboration. At that place are blatant echoes here of Woody Allen's hilarious "Bullets Over Broadway," with Assi serving as the Chazz Palminteri to Salam's witless Cusack, yet he's too much of a bully to be truly endearing.
As the show develops added dimensions of realism under Assi's guidance, Salam's scenes offset devolve into a soap opera, equally he relentlessly pursues an old flame, Miriam (Maisa And Elhadi), despite the fact that they are inherently incompatible. Her want to remain in her home country clashes with Salam's primal demand to move elsewhere, far from the occupation that has traumatized him since his babyhood. I never bought the sentimental progression of their subplot for an instant, especially when the but obstacles separating them get in in the form of tired tropes like an over-the-phone misunderstanding. There is some clever production design behind the scenes, such as an overturned Eiffel Tower that serves as a backdrop to Salam'southward argument with Miriam, when his plans for moving to French republic are inadvertently revealed. Yet it'south only as Salam'southward inner creativity becomes awakened, prompting him to intuitively link various props with ideas of his own creation, does the plot threaten to catch fire.
Alas, the script co-authored by Zoabi and Dan Kleinman concludes with a moral that I simply couldn't have. What makes it all the more disheartening is that there's considerable potential in the set-up. Assi is intent on strong-arming Salam into writing a finale for the testify where Tala marries Yehuda, though Bassam argues that such an idealized catastrophe would be tantamount to the Oslo Accords—a big illusion that changes nil. With both Palestinian and Israeli viewers invested in the show's outcome, Salam could take the opportunity to bridge divisions without undermining the seriousness of the ongoing struggle that he depicts. Every bit Assi's wife affirms, the lather'due south appeal has transcended politics and could potentially serve as some sort of unifying buoy, enabling viewers to empathize with those existing on the other side of the wall.
Instead, the flick ends with a maddening shrug, challenge that any glimmer of hope would be branded as false past viewers, since it doesn't reflect the mess that they take been entrenched in since 1948. This calls into question what the point of storytelling is if information technology'south merely about replicating our reality rather than aiming for something higher. Salam ultimately settles for a compromise leap to please very few bated from Assi, who sheds all trace of personal convictions as long equally it gets him on Goggle box. His wise observation that beloved is shared betwixt those who heed to one another appears to take evaporated from his memory when Salam later on recites the words back to him, mirroring the prove's ain botched continuity involving dropped cancer diagnoses. The film's apolitical stance results in it making no argument, apart from last that lucrative narratives on screens both big and small have now become equally unending as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I cannot imagine a more than depressing fate than that.
Matt Fagerholm
Matt Fagerholm is an Assistant Editor at RogerEbert.com and is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association.
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Tel Aviv on Burn (2019)
100 minutes
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