Broken Wings

Starring Maya Maron and Orli Zilverschatz-Banay. In Hebrew with English subtitles. Rated PG.

There are no politics in Broken Wings, a beautifully crafted new movie from Israel; indeed, events rarely happen outside the sphere of a single family in contemporary Haifa. But the sense of foreboding and regret that governs everyone's actions is achingly au courant.

For some reason--not explained until almost the end--the well-loved father of the Ulman clan has been suddenly taken from them. Nine months later, his wife and four children are still reeling, with everyone chafing at the responsibility of keeping each other afloat.

The tale centres on 17-year-old Maya (Maya Maron), an aspiring musician itching to take her dreams away from the confines of the sweltering coastal town. Unfortunately, the burden of looking after her younger siblings has fallen on her frail shoulders. Sixteen-year-old Yair (Nitai Gvirtz) is a once-promising student who has been kicked out of high school for disruption; Ido (Daniel Magon), 11, has a self-destructive streak in which he indulges while playing hooky from school; and sweet, sad-faced Bahr (Eliana Magon) has basically stopped talking.

Much of this is because the family matriarch, Dafna (Orli Zilverschatz-Banay)--a midwife worn out from the night shift at a Haifa hospital--stayed in bed for three months, leaving the kids to do all the parenting.

A respected stage actor, Zilverschatz-Banay (picture a heftier Jamie Lee Curtis after weeks of no sleep) makes the 43-going-on-70 mother alternately infuriating and immensely sympathetic. When Dafna keeps literally bumping into a kind Russian-Jewish doctor (Vladimir Freedman) where she works, a sigh of hope enters her bedraggled life, but there isn't a hint of Hollywood to what happens.

This may sound like pretty dark stuff overall, but young writer-director Nir Bergman's feature debut is so astonishingly sure-footed, both in the flow of deftly sketched situations and in its sheer cinematic grace, that you never feel dragged down by the Ulmans' unhappiness. Instead, there's a surprising amount of sharp humour and unsyrupy warmth as the family collapses and then gradually begins to find its feet again.

It could be argued that this non-Swedish Bergman manipulates his tale to add a bit more melodrama to the mix, but none of the developments--which also include the older children's tentative romantic entanglements--take predictable turns. One could also say that its events, on a symbolic level, parallel the rudderless way Israel has inched forward since the assassination of father figure Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Let's just hope that the nation wakes up as well as the Ulmans do at the end of Broken Wings.

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