Sunday, March 30, 2008

Va, vis et deviens (Live and Become)

Epic (by which I mean long and over-reaching) journey of a young boy whose mother forces him to leave her, pretend to be Jewish and pretend to be another woman's son so that he will be evacuated from Ethiopia as part of "Operation Moses" to Israel in the early 80s.

In Israel, with his new family, he grows up, finds new meanings of faith and family and eventually, happiness and closure. Neat.

The problems, however, overshadowed -- they included awkward dialog, trite plot turns and a little too much deus ex machina to be enjoyable for me. The good things were the actor who played the young Schlomo and the historical context which I had never learned about before.

We decided we needed to coin another tag for these kinds of movies: the Heavy-Hearted Foreign Film.

No comments: