THE HOLY LAND
Directed by: Eitan Gorlin.
Produced by: Udi Yerushalmi & Ran Bogin.
Written by: Gorlin.
Director of Photography: Nils Kenaston.
Edited by: Yair Elazar & Josh Apter.
Music by: Chris Cunningham.
Released by: Cavu.
Country of Origin: Israel. 96 min. Not Rated.
With: Oren Rehany, Tchelet Semel & Saul Stein.

Over news footage of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, a female voice reveals, “Men in the Middle East are primitive and stupid.” The voice belongs to the striking Russian immigrant Sasha (Semel), a hardened whore. At the strip bar The Love Boat, she meets Mendy (Rehany), a horny 20-year-old rabbinical student following in his father’s footsteps, who is instantly smitten with her. To get closer to Sasha, he becomes a bartender at Mike’s Place, her hangout. But after an incendiary and fast-paced beginning, this clichéd drama loses narrative coherence and becomes a long and tepid courtship, as it is more than obvious that Sasha is merely biding time with Mendy until something better comes along. Where there’s no spark, there’s no fire. She puts him down, and he still hopes, evidence to the contrary, that she’ll fall in love with him. Oddly, for a bar set in contemporary Jerusalem, there are only a few customers and the same ones at that. The forced joviality of the bar’s patrons and the overacting by Mendy’s mentor and boss Mike (Stein) stick out like a sore thumb. Then there is a murky subplot involving the dealings between Mike and an Arab, which leads to an ending that feels arbitrary. Only the on-location scenes of Jerusalem and the countryside enliven the story. With its threadbare sets and without a fully fleshed-out script, this is the indie equivalent of an Off-Off-Broadway production. KT
August 15, 2003