Five years ago “The Baker from Berlin”, Ophir Raoul Greitzer’s first film, Won the love of the audience and many Ophir awards. As I remember, the gentle and touching film told about the developing relationship between a Berlin baker and the widow of his Jerusalem lover, who knows nothing about the relationship that existed between her husband and the lonely young man who entered her cafe one day asking for a job. The film also included the most beautiful sex scene I have ever seen in Israeli cinema. Such an impressive opening to a film career raises high expectations for the second film, but this is where the phenomenon known as the “second film syndrome” comes in – the difficulty of dealing with those expectations.
“America” seems in many respects to be an ambitious and stylized variation on the themes and content of Greitzer’s first film, but although the film is visually stunning and its script is more convoluted and detailed, it is less emotionally cohesive. This is especially noticeable in the sex scene. Here, too, the lonely hero and the partner of his (Platonic) lover who is in a coma participate in it, but it does not have the longing, emotion and pain that flowed from the screen in the corresponding scene in “The Baker from Berlin”. Greitzer tried to create a melodrama in the full sense of the word, including the saturated colors that we tend to identify with Pedro Almodóvar (he in turn lifted it from the Hollywood melodramas of the fifties), but I feel that something in the authenticity of the characters has stiffened.
At the beginning of the film we are introduced to Eli (Michael Moshunov), an Israeli who lives in Chicago and goes by the name Eli Cross – a Christian name in a manifesto. Eli Cross was also the name of the film director played by Peter O’Toole in “The Double”. The cult film from 1980 tells of a fugitive from the law who stumbles upon a film set, accidentally drowns the stuntman, and is required to fill his place. I don’t know if the name was asked from there, but between the plots of the two films there are several launching points, including the drowning and the duplication.
America | Photo: PR
Eli teaches children to swim and the image of the pool is central to the plot of “America”, and its symbolic layer. Remember, the pool was also used as the site where Thomas went to mourn his beloved in “The Baker from Berlin”. A phone calls Eli to return to Israel to take care of his late father’s estate. He cut off contact with him, because he was a violent and bad father in every way – the guns hanging on the white walls in his apartment hint at the kind of person he was – and it seems that Eli is afraid that he has inherited the spark of violence. The first man Eli meets when he arrives at the apartment where he grew up is the neighbor across the street, who was like a surrogate father. The neighbor is played by Muni Moshunov, and for Israeli viewers, who are aware of the family connection between the two Moshunovs, this initial meeting creates a momentary dissonance.
While trying to sell the apartment, Eli reconnects with the neighbor’s son, his beloved friend Yotam (Ofari Bitterman), who runs a flower shop with his fiancee Iris (Osherat Ingdasht). An accident during a trip together, which occurs in a natural pool in the north, puts Yotam into a coma and leaves Eli in Israel (these plot details are revealed in the trailer, so I don’t consider them a spoiler). Feelings of guilt motivate him to invite the gardener Iris to flower the neglected backyard of his childhood apartment, and between the two develops a relationship reminiscent of the one at the center of “The Baker from Berlin”. An orgy of flowers in all colors replaces the eroticism of the whipped cream cakes in that film.
America | Photo: PR
The relationship between Eli and them, who were inseparable in their childhood, is not sexual, but it is full of homoerotics. It is found in the looks Yotam sends towards me, and in the water they wade in together and separately, with or without a swimsuit. Between Eli and Iris, or between Moshunov and Ingdasht, on the other hand, there is no real chemistry, and the lack of it hurts the experience of the film, which signals emotions instead of enveloping us in them. The visual and sound texture of the film is layered with many symbols that invite us to decipher them – puppets on strings, a buried urn in the backyard, and as mentioned, a lot of water, life and death. The lonely and withdrawn Eli wanders the world as a dead animal, carrying a heavy burden from his childhood that he tried to bury deep, until the girl with the name of Farah makes his life bloom.
Greitzer designed a melodrama full of secrets and fateful reversals, which borrows visual codes from films by European filmmakers. Like Jacques Demy’s ultra-colorful “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” for example, “America” is divided into three chapters (plus a short finale) whose names are written on the screen in large letters. The flower shop and the dreamy garden that Iris creates in the yard of Eli’s house flood the screen with wonderful colors – the rights are reserved to photographer Omri Aloni and Daniel Kossov, Greitzer’s partner, who designed the shop. The outdoor scenes are also eye-catching with vivid colors. It’s just a shame that the characters remain puppets on strings.
3.5 stars
Directed by Ofir Raul Greitzer. With Osherat Ingdasht, Michael Moshunov, Ofri Bitterman, Irit Shelag, Moni Moshunov. Israel 2022, 127 min.