Zaidi Smith once said that every story happens twice – inside and outside, and these are two different stories. “Valeria Gets Married”, which was released this weekend, is a good illustration of this. Apparently it has one story, but actually it has two. You see what happens on the outside, but what happens on the inside – you can only imagine.
The heroine, after whom the film is named, is a young Ukrainian woman, who arrives in Israel to meet her intended groom for the first time – Eitan, one of those Israeli men who found a match through one of those dubious websites that know/sells them “Ukrainian brides”. Christina, the heroine’s sister, already lives in Israel, And she married an Israeli named Michael in the same way. He is also the one who mediated between her sister and her groom, and the deal should pay off for all parties.
Eitan, a guy who is not particularly attractive by any means, will finally find a woman to share his life with. Valeria, who lives in a poor country, will get to move to one of the richest countries in the western world. Christina, a lonely immigrant, will gain her sister’s company, and the money Ethan received from the mediation will finance her fertility treatments. Later we will also learn that she undergoes conversion. This is how it is in Israel: everyone must be married, everyone must be Jewish, everyone must have children.
We are used to local films about mothers and daughters. “Valeria Gets Married” is a rare example of a movie about sisters, and thanks to the director’s use of the faces of the heroines, they become mirrors of each other – when one looks at the other, she sees her future or her past.
Valeria came to Israel to get married, but at an early stage decides that this arrangement does not suit her, and we are left to decipher why – did she discover things in the face-to-face meeting with Eitan that she did not internalize in the virtual conversations with him? Or maybe it’s because she got a glimpse of her sister’s life as an invited bride in Israel, realized what awaited her and decided to rebel against it?
In one of the climaxes of the film, Valeria interrogates her sister about her relationship with Michael and asks her – “Do you love him?”. Christina answers her question, but what she doesn’t say is even more important than what she does say, and her answer raises bigger questions for us , and first of all wondering if love is really the most important value.
These questions are also relevant outside the context of the brides in the invitation. Look around you: did everyone you know get married and stay married only out of love? If we answer this from a broad point of view, the answer is certainly negative. After all, marriage under romantic circumstances and economic independence of women are quite modern inventions.
The questions are not only historical, but also philosophical – who determined that love is a supreme value? Can we judge someone who married for financial reasons or for convenience? And in this particular case: let’s say that Valeria decides to escape from this relationship and return to her homeland, can this be defined as a “happy ending”? There are no bouquets of roses waiting for her when she returns there. This is an opportunity to point out that the film was written and filmed before the invasion of Ukraine, and now it is loaded with new and different meanings, what’s more, that its heroines are from the Russian part of the country, and speak Russian.
“Valeria Gets Married” lasts only 70 minutes – much less than the average length of this year’s Oscar hits. In fact, even if you watch it twice in a row, this period of time will still be shorter than “The Fivelmen”. Despite this modest volume, the film manages to put a line on the table A long string of weighty questions. He does it in an implicit, updated and sophisticated way, without spoon-feeding and without providing easy answers.
“Valeria is getting married” respects its audience and respects its characters, almost each and every one of them. There are no caricatures in it and it does not have easy dichotomies of the type “bad men, good women, good Russians, bad Israelis”. Michael is certainly not a complete evil. He has human sides, and at one point we even see him in a position of defensiveness and weakness, when an Israeli of Russian origin makes a racist comment to him. Eitan is also not an arch-villain, but mostly pathetic, and the most one-sided character in the film turns out to be a woman in the end. In the end, if there are “guilty” and “bad” here, these are not human beings but the inequality between men and women and the imbalance between countries like Israel and Ukraine.
The virtues of the film are not only scriptural, but also cinematic. In addition to the short length, the volume of “Valeria Gets Married” is also geographically limited – most of it takes place in one apartment, necessity is the father of invention, and these limitations oblige director Michal Vinik and her partners, led by photographer Guy Raz, to show creativity and resourcefulness. They meet the task with great success.
Time and again the film manages to use the camera and space to create drama and tension. “Valeria Gets Married” is never boring for a moment, and it is so intense and rich that at the end of it the feeling is that so many things happened, and that the result was more than 70 minutes.
In a film so compressed, there is no room for mistakes – and the performance is flawless. Yaakov Zeda Daniel broke through exactly ten years ago in “At Li Lila” and since then he has been everywhere, and rightly so. Avraham Shalom Levy, in the character of Eitan, plays his outstanding cinematic role so far and copes well with the ungrateful role of a depersonalized man. Lena Freifeld, who until now has been active mainly on stage, this year showed her extraordinary cinematic presence in one scene of “Concerned Citizen”, and here she does it for a longer time. Above all, most of the weight rests on the shoulders of Dasha Tavoronovich in the role of Valeria , and it is mesmerizing and magnetizing from the first second to the last.
“Valeria Gets Married” is not only the best Israeli film this spring, but in general one of the best films of recent times. Its only problem is the timing: if it had been released a few years ago, for example, it would have evoked much more echoes, in Israel and around the world.
Due to the limitations of the local market, a long time always passes between the production and distribution of a film, and look what has happened since the filming of “Valeria Gets Married” ended: Russia invaded Ukraine and worsened the situation of Ukrainian women, among other things; the phenomenon of “brides from Ukraine” intensified, as did racism spiced with misogyny against them in Israel. And more with us: a new Knesset, for which women are the poor.
So who said that Israeli cinema no longer has value? Watching “Valeria Gets Married” is a golden opportunity to check what changed between 2020 and 2023 and get a double lesson: how bad the situation was then, and how much worse it is now.