Sometimes bad critical reviews in the tailwind of a movie is not justified, though it often is. Good critical reviews that are less justified are further between but they do occur ... and when they do, it is almost always due to political correctness. This movie here, I would argue, falls in that latter category.
I don´t mind political aspects at all, but I don´t like them to be more or less sophistically implied and tried manipulated into my view. When it all comes down, the human experience is a bout basic aspects of everyday life and decisions. Whenever that is shrouded in some kind of "feelgood" political correctness, I take note.
Ok, with that out of the way, I can get into the review. An Egyptian police music band, gets lost on a trip to an arab concert in Israel. At first the oldschool bandleader takes pride in trying to solve the issue himself, but soon realises that it is going to take more than stubbornness to get there.
They take a rest at a small road cafe and the owner, a single woman, shows her hospitality and offers them to stay with her and at her brother´s place the night over to save them the trouble of finding shelter for the night here out in Israeli nowhere land.
Soon we realise that the female owner of the café is "single" and rather flirty. The hunky, skirt chasing fellow in the band, exchanges "eyes" with her and we understand, that she is not foreign to feasting on men or having one night stands with men she fancies just for the sake of sex.
The bandleader suddenly grows more and more pale as his authority over the "band" seems to fade as he is having a hard time both complying with her extremely sexy flirtyness and obvious hittings on him or any one else in her vicinity. The hunky guy gets invited to a skating venue with another family member and funnily ends up in a romantic counsellor role.
The underlying story here, among the presumed funny and cute situations, is that when we get down to everyday interactions, we are all basically the same. When our stiff cultural facade (the ridiculous light blue unfitting uniforms) is down, we reveal a basic human trait that goes through us all.
And yes, that is certainly true to some extend and I am very sympathetic to the idea. But the political undertones, the militant egyptians, and the carefree, hedonic israeli´s, is just too blatantly obvious. It is a israeli film and though the director wants to bridge the gap between politics, he does much to fuel the fire at the same time. Or at least the way of making Egypt "toxicly masculine" and Israel, gynocentric "feminist", is too caricatured. He can get away with it because it is all veiled in humour, most of the time.
And in the end, the humour does not settle with me. Only on a few occasions, I thought it was a truly funny scene. Most of the time, it feels stiff and awkward. The acting is not particularly great either in my opinion. The style is a slightly choreographed, two dimensional frontal placement of the camera and this very much reminds me of weirdly funny movies like Napoleon Dynamite.
It has the same simplistic and shaved down cinematography to it that I always sense stems from a lack of balls in the abilities with the camera work. A simple way to make an artsy movie without too much cinematographical talent.
the camera work it does use is not that bad as such, it is just artificially limited at least in some situations where I felt I needed more depth to get the story rolling. When the bandleader and the cafe woman exchange life stories is the deepest moment and I thought .. finally some emotionally depth in an otherwise rather shallow experience.. and then it steered back to the shallowness.
It gets my small recommendation for the sense of "fish out of water" feel of the blue men in an israeli desert and still being an attempt at dealing with questions of deadly importance. It just does not deliver nearly as much as I hoped for either in the department of the individual stories or the conflict as such. Good try but no waterpipe.
6/10
