THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – NOT TO BE MISSED
The chances of programming bring together two Israeli films that everything should separate. A sentimental fiction, All Eyes Off Me, of Hadas Ben Aroya, 34 years old. A political documentary Mizrahim. The Forgotten of the Promised Land, by Michale Boganim, 44 years old. In truth, everything brings them together. Intimacy. Politics. The dull melancholy of an identity in perdition. And, of course, the fiction is full of politics, the documentary is steeped in affect. We know, in France, Hadas Ben Aroya, by his first feature film, People That Are Not Meproduced in 2016, released in 2018. She interpreted, naked half the time, Joy, a young woman of the Israeli hype, distant feminine and Middle Eastern avatar of Woody Allen, who connects with a petulant stoicism the most catastrophic.
All Eyes Off Me radicalizes the subject. This film, of a clearer savagery, holds in three tableaux, forming a portrait of a certain Avishag, a statuesque girl with milky skin, neither beautiful nor ugly. The first: a young woman, pregnant, thinks of announcing it to her boyfriend during a party, who is actively taking care of another young woman (Avishag). second table, this other woman very seriously wishes to be violated by this new lover. Finally, the same, severely battered, plans to seduce the elderly man whose dog she is walking. Three movements, three resounding slaps. Plus two beautifully staged songs (Personal message, by Francoise Hardy; Ze mikvar, by Matti Caspi, on a poem by Leah Goldberg). And, everywhere, beyond the flesh that is exposed, the desire that torments and the pleasure that tortures, insane and strange scenes, skinned and tender, as rarely seen.
A choice. The report of an abortion, by a tipsy girlfriend at a party, supposed to reassure you, in reality debited with a machine gun and as bloody as a butcher’s stall. The enamored listening of a robotic “X Factor” contestant in a dog park. The languor at the edge of a swimming pool strewn with dead leaves, on a sad song which tells the life which passes, worthy of the spleenitic cinema of Lucrecia Martel. Self-annihilation next to a man who could be your lover but who treats you like a father. No more inane talk driven by panic. Unwelcome confessions that get out of hand. Initiatives that backfire. A way of walking, of feeling, of loving, as if beside yourself and the society around you.
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