Your Email:

Friend's Email:

Note: (optional)

Subject:

Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/20721/full/20721/provocative-holy-land-generates-more-heat-than-light/ <br /><br /> <b>Provocative ‘Holy Land’ generates more heat than light</b> <br /> Friday, October 10, 2003 | by <p>michael fox </p> <br /><br /><p>“The Holy Land,” like 90 percent of all movies set in Jerusalem, portrays a collision between faith and the real world.<br /><br /> Eitan Gorlin’s calculated tale of a virginal rabbinical student falling for a prostitute aggressively tramples a fistful of taboos and pushes a number of buttons. <br /><br /> A young director’s attempt to distill the entire Middle East dynamic into a handful of one-dimensional characters, “The Holy Land” is a textbook case of a film generating more heat than light. Engrossing but hardly enlightening, “The Holy Land” is best viewed as a provocative conversation-starter.<br /><br /> “The Holy Land” opens today around the Bay Area.<br /><br /> The movie is structured as the coming of age of a nebbishy yeshiva bocher, Mendy (Oren Rehany, making his feature film debut), whose interest in sex is getting in the way of his studies.<br /><br /> Surprisingly, Mendy’s rabbi advises him to visit a prostitute — a non-Jewish one, preferably — in another city. Presumably once his libido and curiosity are satisfied, Mendy will return with his commitment renewed.<br /><br /> Only Mendy falls for the first girl he sets eyes on in a Tel Aviv brothel. Sasha (Tchelet Semel) is 19, Russian, pretty and nowhere near as innocent as she seems. In fact, she has infinitely more real-world experience than this boychick she sees through in a glance.<br /><br /> That same night, Mendy meets an American who also favors Sasha’s services. Broad-shouldered and gregarious, Mike (Saul Stein) is almost a caricature of the backslapping, loudmouth American.<br /><br /> He has a bar in Jerusalem called, coincidentally, “Mike’s Place,” and in short order Mendy starts working there as a bartender. In fact, “The Holy Land” is loosely based on Gorlin’s novella, “Mike’s Place, A Jerusalem Diary,” drawn from his experiences working at the pub.<br /><br /> The regulars at Mike’s include a middle-aged settler who’s never without his rifle and a mysterious Arab dealer of, well, we’re not sure if it’s stolen property or drugs or something worse.<br /><br /> Mendy gets some lessons in human nature, and they’re not all pretty. Sasha resists his immature plays at romance, preferring Mike’s casual cynicism and no-strings sex to Mendy’s earnest overtures and long-term plans.<br /><br /> Although “The Holy Land” is ostensibly Mendy’s story, Sasha is far and away the more compelling figure. Thanks to a screenplay that continually reveals more depth and shadows to her character, and Tchelet Semel’s ice-and-fire performance, Sasha is the only three-dimensional person in the film.<br /><br /> When she lambastes Mendy for his naïve, half-baked dreams of some blissful future life together, it’s easily the best scene in the movie.<br /><br /> “The Holy Land” posits a brutish, sordid world where everybody’s out for themselves. Mendy comes to see that the circumscribed rules of the yeshiva — and, by extension, the rigid laws of Orthodox Judaism — afford some measure of insulation and protection from the nastiness of contemporary society.<br /><br /> Ultimately, though, “The Holy Land” suggests that faith only carries you so far. The film’s title is clearly meant to be ironic: In Jerusalem, nobody is immune from profane reality. </p> <p> “The Holy Land” opens today at the Lumiere in San Francisco, the Shattuck in Berkeley, Century Cinema 16 in Mountain View, Camera 3 in San Jose and CineArts in Sausalito, and October 17 at the Rialto Lakeside in Santa Rosa.</p> <p> </p>

Please enter the letters and numbers you see in the image below: