July 12, 2002 | Here's the pitch: Russian émigrés
endure romantic and financial upheavals after arriving in Israel just
before the start of the 1991 Gulf War. Sounds like a scenario for heavy
drama, right? Guess again.
Writer-director Arik Kaplun plays the cultural and emotional clashes
mostly for laughs in Yana's Friends , an engaging romantic comedy
that earned nearly all of the glittering prizes at the 1999 Israeli Academy
Awards.
It has taken more than two years for this
free-spirited and life-affirming film to gain wide exposure on the
U.S. art-house circuit, which says a lot -- none of it good -- about
the bottom-line mentality that prevails even among supposedly “independent” distributors.
In one key respect, however, the timing of the delayed release is fortuitous:
After 9/11, perhaps American moviegoers will be all the more receptive
to this intelligently heartfelt celebration of love and resilience
in the shadow of war and catastrophe.
Lovely young Yana -- winningly played by
Evelyne Kaplun, the director's real-life wife – arrives in Tel Aviv
to start a new life with Fima (Israel Damidov), her wheeler-dealer
husband. Unfortunately, Fima soon decides to wheel and deal his way
back to Russia. Yana is left to fend for herself, penniless and pregnant,
while continuing to share an apartment with Eli (Nir Levi), a womanizing
would-be filmmaker who supports himself as a wedding videographer.
Predictably, one thing leads to another,
and the roommates fall in love. Unpredictably, the lovers and their
neighbors manage to survive and thrive while only slightly inconvenienced
by the demands of life during a state of war. Air-raid sirens wail,
designated rooms are meticulously sealed – to
provide safe havens from poison-gas attacks – and everyone wonders if
the next sound they hear will be a Scud missile fired from Iraq. Even
so, life goes on.
Another Russian émigré, a
hotheaded hustler named Alik (Vladimir Friedman), stumbles into a profitable
scam that requires the exploitation of his seemingly senile father-in-law
(Moscu Alcalay). An accordion-playing street musician (Shmil Ben-Ari)
tries to maintain his prime location on a well-traveled thoroughfare.
And Rosa (Dalia Friedland), the cranky landlady of the apartment building
where most of the main characters live, enjoys a sentimental reunion
that proves it's never too late for happily-ever-aftering.
Yana's Friends isn't a black comedy, strictly speaking. But
it somehow manages to find a surprising amount of humor in deadly serious
and even potentially tragic situations. Typical of the movie's cheeky
impudence is a scene in which Yana and Eli, brought together in a sealed
room during an air raid, impulsively make love while still wearing their
gas masks.
Hey, it's like I said: Life goes on. So does love.