The Holy Land (2001/2003)
A hit at the Slamdance Film Festival,
"Holy Land" is being sold as a love story and relationship/culture
class movie about a young rabbinical student (those
Jewish boys who always wear black suits and have the
long curled hair on the sides of their face) and a
young Russian prostitute. Don't believe the hype.
That's only about a forth of the film. The rest of
it is some hackneyed and substandard bullshit about
the political situation in the Middle East, between
the Arabs and the Jews, featuring some pretty typical
characters from indie films. It also features some
pretty substandard camera work and cinematography
too.
It is indie. I will give it that.
But I was sold on a love story and that is only a
small slice of the pie here. Young actor Oren Rehany
is often attractive to look at but it seems at times
he changed and grew-up a little during the filming
for he can also look different from frame to frame.
He becomes one of those guys that can waver between
cute and not-so-cute. Regardless, he is a competent
actor and his Mendy is a character that fascinates
us and draws us into his world. His relationship with
the prostitute played by Tchelet Semel is the stuff
great films are made of. When the two meet, sparks
fly. The chemistry here seems boundless. And a film
featuring a young man struggling with his morals and
his religious beliefs (coming from a devoutly religious
background) while also bedding a prostitute who may
be the love of his life or the biggest manipulator
and "user" ever to be seen in films seems like a wonderful
and engrossing idea.
Plus the actors are simply fascinating.
Rehany looks like a young, ethnic Miles Silverberg
(from TV's Murphy Brown) and Semel comes across as
Natasha Lyonne's cuter, softer little cousin. They
are consummate actors and interesting to look at.
We really want no more than to watch them for 90 minutes.
But filmmaker and writer Eitan Gorlin,
who based the story on his own life experiences, must
be a wuss, or at the very least, a very unsure writer.
He's afraid to simply bring us this fascinating story.
He doesn't trust his audience to love and understand
the relationship between the two diverse leads. So
he crams his script and his film full of the most
uninteresting, unattractive and typical secondary
characters (who end up become more lead characters
than his Russian girl) and gives them so many convoluted
and political motivations that only a true scholar
of Middle Eastern politics could ever figure out what
the hell is going on here. It's boring, first and
foremost, and it is a completely unnecessary distraction
from the true diamond at the soul of his film - the
love story, secondly.
Worse yet, when the young Jew and
the prostitute finally do get to have the climactic
scene we've been waiting for, where they struggle
to really come together, we suddenly notice that Rehany
only has three fingers on one of his hands. This is
never referenced nor hidden in the film. It just suddenly
seems blatant and obvious during this pivotal scene
and our minds spin trying to figure out whether he
was born that way or had an accident. We can't stop
looking at it. And suddenly we realize we're missing
the best part of the movie, the part we've been waiting
almost an hour for. They part where the two come together.
Damn! It's frustrating.
Of course, it isn't long before
Gorlin yet again takes us away from this attractive
film and dumps us back in the political no-man's land
that is his supposed subplot. (The plot of this film
is 30 minutes while the sub-plot bullshit goes on
for 90).
At its core, "The Holy Land" is
an excellent film. The heart of the story is amazing
and fresh. The main actors here, the two leads, are
as engrossing and as exciting as the story they bring
us. The score by Chris Cunningham accents the stunning
beauty of this story. But it is the extraneous stuff
that kills Gorlin's film. He allows his film to become
lost in the jungle of his subplot, his secondary cast
and his typical cinematography. Sadly, these touches,
which were meant to be accents, overwhelm the entire
film. Ultimately Gorlin even allows these distractions
to end his film with a disastrous and ridiculous exclamation
point that is much more a contrived whimper than the
ironic bang it sets out to be.
Notes:
Filmed in 2001 and playing many
festivals over the next two years, the film was released
to arthouses in July of 2003 by CAVU.
Viewed in Austin at the Dobie in
August 2003 with Johnny Oh!
