REVIEWS COMPETITION Innocent Saturday REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY


Jean Renoir famously commented that his The Rules Of The Game, made on the eve of war, was about a society “dancing on a volcano”. That’s true too of the world depicted in Alexander Mind- adze’s troubling Innocent Saturday (V Subbotu), except that in this case, the volcano has already erupted. The story is set in April 1986, immediately after


Invisible REVIEWED BY MARK ADAMS


Michal Aviad’s powerful and provocative debut feature Invisible (Lo Roim Alaich) is the gripping story of two women who meet by chance and real- ise they are still haunted by a shared nightmare from their past. With passionate and impressive performances by Ronit Elkabetz and Evgenia Dodina, this haunting Israeli film will be a fixture on the festival circuit and has the resonance to appeal to arthouse distributors. The two charismatic lead actresses will be the


focal point of the film, which details how two intelligent and driven women attempt to deal with the fact they were victims of a serial rapist (dubbed ‘The Polite Rapist’ by police and media) some 20 years earlier. Aviad’s film is a work of fiction but with real


facts and incidents worked into the story — the characters are imagined, though the rapist, who raped 16 women and girls in Tel Aviv in 1977-78, is real, and two vocal testimonies of actual victims of the rapist are interlaced into the film. Reserved television editor Nira (Dodina) comes


across Lily (Elkabetz), a left-wing activist, while covering an event, and realises she knows her from attending the line-up to identify the rapist some 20 years earlier. Both are strong, independ- ent women but at the same time they are haunted by what happened in their past. Nira, mild-mannered and living with her


young daughter, becomes obsessed with looking back to the rapes and what happened to the rap- ist, and gently inserts herself into Lily’s life. Lily is married with two grown-up children but her mar-


n 10 Screen International in Berlin February 15, 2011


the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, on a Saturday when the population of the neighbour- ing town are still blithely unaware of the cataclysm. While the opening sequence ostensibly


promises an arthouse variant of the generic disas- ter movie format, Mindadze’s film proves much more distinctive and stylistically heightened, so much so that its sheer relentlessness can feel overwhelming. The film is bound to be widely toasted on the


fest circuit, though its stylistic intensity and overall bleakness — not to mention a hard-to-like pro-


PANORAMA


Isr-Ger. 2011. 90mins Director Michal Aviad Production companies Plan B Productions, Israel Film Fund, ZDF, Arte International sales WestEnd Films, www.westendfilms.com Producer Ronen Ben-Tal Screenplay Michal Aviad, Tal Omer Cinematography Guy Raz Editor Era Lapid Main cast Ronit Elkabetz, Evgenia Dodina, Mederic Ory, Gil Frank, Sivan Levy, Bar Miniely, Gal Lev


Rus-Ukr-Ger. 2011. 90mins Director/screenplay Alexander Mindadze Production companies Non-Stop Production, Bavaria Pictures, Passenger Film, Sota Cinema Group International sales Bavaria Film International, www.bavaria-film.de Producers Alexander Rodnyansky, Sergej Melkumov, Matthias Esche, Philipp Kreuzer, Alexander Mindadze, Dmitrij Efremov, Oleg Kohan Cinematography Oleg Mutu Editors Dasha Danilova, Ivan Lebedev Production designer Denis Bauer Music Mihail Kovalev Main cast Anton Shagin, Svetlana Smirnova- Marcinkevich, Stanislav Rjadinskij, Vasilij Gusov


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tagonist — will make it a tough sell for all but adventurous arthouse outlets. Set over some 36 hours, the film begins at night,


with Valery (Shagin), an engineer and party offi- cial, running desperately to get to Chernobyl, pelt- ing up roads and through undergrowth, the camera pelting with him — as it does for much of the film. When we first hear of events, it appears there have been some containable explosions, but when the camera wanders into a meeting of despairing bigwigs, it emerges the main reactor has blown — as signalled by an ominous glow in the night sky. Valery is sworn to silence and, for whatever reason, largely keeps his promise. He heads into town, confides in his sort-of girl-


friend Vera (Smirnova-Marcinkevich) and takes her for a manic dash in the hope of catching a train out of town. They do not make it, but end up at a restaurant where a raucous wedding party is in full flow, with Vera singing in the band for which Valery used to be drummer. As the party gets ever more unruly, Valery boozily re-bonds with his buddies, tempers flaring over old differences. The film’s execution is hugely individual but


unrelenting, to the point that many viewers may weary of the onslaught. Another problem is that the volatile characters — fighting one minute, hugging the next — tend to behave as people do in art films rather than in reality, though Mindadze might argue his film is true to the nature of catas- trophe panic, and of Ukrainian society on drunken weekends.


SCREEN SCORE ★★★


riage is failing, with her husband feeling he has nothing to offer this self-contained and deter- mined woman. The women gradually spend more time together,


recalling the terrible moment of their rape; delving into court records and eventually driving to the house of the rapist, who was released after just 10 years, despite being found guilty of serial rape. As usual, Elkabetz makes a striking impact as


the seemingly perfect wife/mother/campaigner whose life is beginning to crack ever so slightly, with her glacial aloofness meshing perfectly with


the character of the forthright Lily, who gradually realises she must deal with the horrors of her past. Equally fine is Dodina, with her frizzy fair hair and sense of compassion a contrast to Elkabetz, but who realises that reliving the past will help the two women deal with their futures. In her debut film, director Aviad shoots with a


good deal of restraint, never exploiting the har- rowing subject matter but allowing the moving story of two women dealing with a long- repressed trauma to be told in an engrossing and emotive manner.


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