Ga'agua (2017) Reviews

• Too convoluted for its own good

  ayoreinf2017-07-20

  Savi Gabizon presents us with a unique take on parenthood, on love, on mourning and on a few other very mundane issues. He gets superb performance from Shai Avivi, and Assi Levy, isn't falling far behind him. (and even that is simply due to a shorter amount of screen time). In fact every aspect of this film is of the highest quality, but it seems to me that Gabizon simply fell in love with his own unique twists and turns and even after he made all his points and told us all he had to tell, the movie drags on for 10 extra minutes or so. And than eventually ends exactly where we knew it'll end. So instead of fresh and unique view on all the issues I counted at the beginning, we're left with a "soap opera" and not in a good way. It was so close to being a perfect 10, and ended being an 8/10 - simple waste.

• Repressed father discovers romantic urges after unknown son's death

  maurice_yacowar2018-05-23

  The title does not have an obvious fit to the narrative. But the complexities of desire - and the costs of its suppression - are clearly a central concern here. Interesting for an Israeli film - indeed the dominant Ophir (e.g.,Oscar) winner - this is a completely secular and personal drama. There are no religious references, nor for that matter political. On both counts, that's quite rare. Ariel is a successful bachelor industrialist. Old love Lilia left him because he didn't want to have a child. Having been beaten by his own father, he feared perpetuating that violence, so stayed a bachelor. His fear inhibited any possible longing. Now, 20 years later, Lilia looks him up to say that after he left her she bore his son Adam - who has just died in a traffic accident. Ariel is so busy he can only spare her 45 minutes for their first meeting. So her appearance is a serious disruption. That grows. To attend Adam's funeral Ariel takes more time off from his work. He then extends his stay further in order to learn more about his son. First Ariel learns Adam was involved in a big drug deal, which his best friend now asks Ariel to bail him out of. Ariel denies any responsibility for Adam. But he proceeds to grow more involved in his dead son's life. Adam (i.e.,the first man) converts Ariel into his first stirrings of fatherhood. Ariel suddenly starts to act like a father. He posthumously defends his son against his expulsion form school and his denial of graduation. He investigates his son's tortured passion for Yael, his beautiful French teacher. Ultimately Ariel even contrives - with another bereft father - to arrange the dead son's marriage to a dead girl, for marital bliss in whatever afterlife. Whether Taoism or plain romantic whimsey, the prosaic fathers commit a very romantic act in theoretical service to their dead children. Such an irrational romantic act could only come from hardheaded business types who have all their lives suppressed any romantic stirrings - and can't maintain the dam any longer. Broken families abound here. Adam fought with his mother and her second husband until he fled to live with his then 12-year-old girlfriend's family. Her father is a violent ex-con, who takes out on Ariel his rage at Adam having seduced his little girl. She's pregnant, but her parents insist on her having an abortion rather than risk death as a 15-year-old mother. They resist Ariel's passionate arguments. His offer of turning his entire fortune over to her if she bore his grandson is a dramatic change from his refusing to pay off his son's 8,000 shekel drug debt. The businessman has learned the romantic gesture. Despite his affair with the young girl, Adam pushed his impossible passion for his French teacher. Though she may have unwittingly encouraged him by coming to his band performance, she properly observed the ban on teacher-student relations. She's less responsible in her affair with her school principal. Like the school principal, Yael first expresses her high regard for Adam. As Ariel's interrogation proceeds, however, that pretence crumbles. Adam was expelled for writing a beautiful, sexual and thus embarrassing poem about her - large on a wall across the school. When he persisted in stalking her she came to hate him and finally reported him to the police. He died - or killed himself - when he received that summons. In her beauty, Frenchness, culture, appeal to Adam and own love life, Yael virtually embodies Desire. She/it inspires Adams' book of love poems and especially the graffiti poem, so powerful it invades even the prosaic Ariel in an erotic dream. Yael finds Ariel as "relentless" in his interrogation as son Adam was in his ardor. That's where the title comes in. Humans are creatures of longing. If a desire is denied, whether by another or by one's self, it's at a serious cost and with the danger of a larger eruption. This superbly scripted, imagined and realized psychological drama shows a man of self-denial finally releasing what he has so long suppressed. Of course, posthumously is too late.

• The Hebrew title makes me wonder

  Nozz2017-11-28

  The screenplay (which won the so-called Israeli Oscar, the Ophir award) proceeds a little like a detective story. A father's inquiries about the dead son he never met reveal surprise after interconnected surprise. Certainly the father develops a "longing" for his son, so the movie's English-language title is appropriate, but the Hebrew title, Ga'agua, is a strange word to use in reference to someone you never met. It's more appropriate for someone you once knew or somewhere you once frequented. I wonder whether it isn't indicating that the son is merely a symbol for the long-past relationship that produced him. In any case, it appears that as the father learns about his son, he also learns about himself, and although there is a dreamlike congruence about the elements of the movie-- a young girl is in love with a boy too old for her, the boy is in love with his teacher-- nothing is embarrassingly artificial except a coincidental meeting (in the graveyard) with just the right person to propel the plot forward. The film takes place in Akko (Acre), for whatever reason. The mother remarks at one point that she doesn't have to worry about money (and that's why she never approached the father regarding the son), but I'm not sure that if you don't have to worry about money you live in Akko. Be that as it may, it's good for a movie to have a specific location and Akko is an unusual one. We get to see a little of it, and more would have been welcome. Besides winning the award for best screenplay, the movie was nominated across the board for acting-- best actor, actress, supporting actor, supporting actress, and for that matter casting.