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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 27, 2023 14:25:25 GMT
Actually, Los Colonos deserves to have its trailer displayed as well, to help show us why Chile is such a white country.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 28, 2023 20:59:44 GMT
Kore-eda Hirokazu's new movie Kaibutsu, has perhaps the mode widely divergent English and French titles that I have ever seen. In English it is called Monster. In French it is called L'innocence. It won the prize for best screenplay at the last Cannes festival and was also the last film scored by Ryuichi Sakomoto before his death.
It's about a single mother and her adolescent son. Some sort of fight/incident happens at school, and the mother is determined not to let things slide. The teacher who apparently hit her sonis extremely contrite, but the school principal appear to be a very bitter woman who will not admit that anything wrong happened. The son, Minato, definitely seems to have some psychological problems but it is not clear why. His close friend Eri appears to be younger but does not want people to see them together.
Later in the movie, you are shown the same incidents from different points of view. What really happened is a bit baffling, but nothing is boring.
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 30, 2023 19:07:18 GMT
5 Hectares is considered a "rural comedy" even though it isn't really a comedy at all. It's the usual story of a Parisian executive deciding to pack it in to become a neo-rural with all of the setbacks that it entails. The locals are either amused or hostile at the arrival of a "tourist" as these people are called. What there is of a plot revolves around the protagonist deciding that he needs a tractor to become credible. He gets in a fight, his tractor breaks down, he gets arrested. He also gets unexpected sex with a farmlady. France!
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Post by kerouac2 on Dec 30, 2023 19:19:55 GMT
Robot Dreams (Mon ami robot in France) is a Spanish film with no dialogue. Dog is lonely living in the city (1980s NYC). He sees a TV commercial for a robot kit, and he orders it. He soon has a new best friend, and they do everything together. But at the beach one day, Robot goes in the water and become rusty. Dog has to leave him behind, and the beach closes for the winter. Will he ever see him again?
During the winter, a scavenger with a metal detector finds Robot and sells him for scrap. When Dog returns, he only finds one leg buried in the sand. But he doesn't give up.
I wanted to cry at the end.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 5, 2024 21:49:16 GMT
Caroline Vignal's previous movie My Donkey, My Lover and I was excellent and starred Laure Calamy just like Iris et les hommes (English title It's Raining Men) -- but I thought this new one was crummy. Iris is happily married, but as she is approaching 50 and her sex life has dwindled to nothing, a friend convinces her to use a dating app for sex. And that is the plot of the movie. Big deal. However, I imagine there is a very specfic spectator demographic that is going to want to see it.
Meanwhile, Io Capitano is a totally astounding Italian movie (even though it is almost completely in Wolof and French) about African migrants trying to reach Europe. The main character is Seydou, a Senegalese teenager who leaves his village with a cousin. They pay to be taken through Mali, Niger and across the Sahara to Libya. Everything goes wrong, of course. The migrants are attacked and robbed, the trucks leave them in the middle of nowhere, several of them die in the desert, and they constantly pass rotting corpses along the way. They are advised to wrap their remaining money in plastic and shove it up their anus, but the Libyans even know about this and know how to get it out. Several of them are tortured in really ghastly ways and the others are enslaved. Seydou is sort of lucky because he is sent to finish building a manor with an older man who actually knows masonry, and they are successful, even building a very nice mosaic fountain in front. The owner is pleased and actually releases them and pays for a bus trip to Tripoli. Tripoli is a huge construction zone with thousands of migrants working on high rise apartments until they can save enough money to pay for a passer.
Seydou never gets enough money, but one of the men with a boat (a rust bucket) says that he will accept him and his friend from the Senegalese village (that is a whole other story), with whom he has finally been reunited on the condition that he pilots the boat -- at age 16. "All you have to do it keep an eye on the compass and keep going north." Uh, easier said than done, and the boat is just as overloaded as all of the ones we have seen on news reports.
And this is based on true stories. Every actor and extra in the movie is an authentic (former) migrant. I can't imagine anybody who sees this movie to ever refuse to help migrants.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 6, 2024 5:30:13 GMT
Le Plongeur (The Dishwasher) is the adaptation of a novel from Québec about a young graphic arts student with a gambling addiction. After spending all of his money and infuriating his friends, he finally hits bottom and has to take this job. It's a big busy restaurant with all sorts of stressful characters, some nice and some not so nice. Most movies from Québec are at least partically subtitled in France. This one was fully subtitled, and I confess that I needed it. Now I want to read the novel.
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Post by bjd on Jan 6, 2024 7:30:15 GMT
I heard an interview with the Italian director of Io Capitano. He said the main actor is in fact a theatre student in Senegal, the rest are non-professional.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 6, 2024 15:38:15 GMT
I already went to see Elvis two years ago with a certain amount of trepidation, but I thought that Baz Luhrmann pulled it off. I unfortunately trusted Sofia Coppola to do something good with Priscilla, and I was ded wrong. This is one of the worst movies that I have seen in a long time even though it might actually be faithful to reality, which is what makes it unbearable. Priscilla puts up with all of Elvis's shit and he keeps her at arm's length as much as possible, even preferring to read the bible to having sex. He never wants her to visit him on tour so she just sits at home doing nothing. So there is a whole lot of nothing in the movie. I did enjoy her tower of dyed black hair -- to think that women used to really do that! And of course how she had to put on her false eyelashes before going to the hospital to have a baby...
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 8, 2024 15:57:36 GMT
I finally saw Past Lives and feel a bit ambivalent about it. I've seen lots of Korean movies, so I feel that I have at least a slight grasp of the Korean mentality, so I knew this would be interesting. Two childhood friends were extremely close and became almost boyfriend-girlfriend, but her family moved to North America and she ended up as an adult in New York. They make some video calls as young adults, but then it drops off -- and picks up 12 years later. The guy comes for a visit to New York because he and his girlfriend are taking a break, but the friend in New York has married an American. This is not a secret, but the guy in Korea can't help himself. The reunion is extremely awkward at first, then warms up. The American husband tries to be as gracious as possible, but he kind of knows that he has lost. Emotions can be messy.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 9, 2024 3:10:19 GMT
Thanks for this review. I keep reading about how wonderful Past Lives is, but it only sounded like another variation on romance & nostalgia -- maybe well done, but nothing that tempted me to bother watching it. Your precis and the trailer shore up that impression.
Re: Priscilla and Elvis, Elvis &/or Priscilla ~~ There has always been more than a little ick factor to anything about Elvis, so I have no desire to peep into his private life.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 11, 2024 21:41:07 GMT
Making of is a mess of a movie, but it's supposed to be. It's about a factory going out of business, but a film crew is there to film a fictional version of the event and on top of that someone is hired to film the goings on, not matter what. I found it a bit complicated to figure out when people were really arguing or when they were acting in an argument scene. Meanwhjile, the film runs out of money, and the crew is asked to work for no salary on faith they they will be paid sooner of later. So this creates even more discord. It's supposed to be sort of a comedy but mostly if you are into Schadenfreude.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 11, 2024 22:11:39 GMT
Martin Provost is best know for the fantastic Séraphine from about 8 years ago, and now he is back with another movie about art -- Bonnard, Pierre et Marthe. Pierre Bonnard was born in 1867 and died in 1947 so he is mostly considered a 20th century artist. Reading up on him after seeing the mvoie, I saw that the movie simplified his life as much as possible, because he did so many things you would need at least a six-part mini series to cover most of it. The movie is mostly lush and bucolic. He hires Marthe to pose for him, and she just never leaves. But then Renée comes on the scene and there is a sort of a ménage-à-trois (perhaps fictional) until Pierre and Renée run off to Rome with plans to get married. But then he walks out on her just before they are due to wed and she commits suicide. Meanwhile, Marthe went through an angry phase and destroyed a lot of Pierre's works in thehourse, and she starts to paint herself in a completely different style. But she is happy to see him when he returns and they get married after awhile. She has a successful art show, and their life becomes tranquil and nice again.
However, what I found good about the movie was the lush portrayal of nature, all of the lived-in details of the house and of course the passion of the couple. He left behind something like 10,000 artworks and a third of them are devoted to Marthe, usually nude. There is a Pierre Bonnard museum in Le Cannet where he and Marthe died.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 12, 2024 17:00:07 GMT
Baavgai Bolohson (If Only I Could Hibernate) is a rare Mongolian movie, and it is everything I want from cinema -- places I have never seen before and people who live in unexpectedly fascinating ways. I don't get to see very many Mongolian movies, but the last one before this was also fascinating -- a man living with his wife and family in the middle of nowhere is sent by his wife to the big city to buy condoms because they have too many children, but he comes back instead with a television set, which pretty much works just as efficiently as a condom.
In this movie, the yurt is in the city, because people live in them in the shadow of ultra modern apartment blocks when they have lost their herds. Ulzii is a bright teenager who is a physics whiz. He lives with his widowed mother and two younger siblings. The mother is a illiterate alcoholic and not very motivated to get a job. So Ulzii has to do all sorts of odd jobs to put food on the table, and this is not extremely compatible with school. But his teacher wants him to enter a physics competition, whose top prize is a full scholarship to a prestigious university. The mother finally gets a job somewhere, but it is not where they are living. She wants to take the family with her but Ulzii refuses because he doesn't want her to ruin his life. In the end, she leaves all the kids behind with Ulzii in charge. This is not ideal.
Even their dog finally freezes and starves to death in his dog house, and this is where you get a real view of a different culture. An old man helps Ulzii bury the dog but he instructs him "you have to cut off the tail and put it under his head so that he can reincarnate as a human being."
Times are really tough for the four kids. In one scene they are sharing a single cardboard pot of instant noodles as their dinner. The littlest kid slurps up most of them.
Social services bring a smoke filter for the yurt (actually, in Mongolia a yurt (Turkish word) is called a ger), yay! But when they plug it in, they discover that the electricity has been cut off, so it is useless.
Life goes on... This is work of fiction but most of the elements are based on a documentary.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 12, 2024 19:11:23 GMT
Wow -- that looks really compelling and beautifully acted besides!
What is the name of the documentary on which some elements are based, please?
I recently re-read Riding the Iron Rooster and that's all I know about modern day Mongolia and its people. Even so, that book was written in the mid to late 1980s and does not cover those subjects in great depth. This movie would be more of an eye-opener.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 12, 2024 19:40:46 GMT
I only saw that mentioned in the blurb on IMdB. But while looking for other sources, I came across this interesting interview with the director.
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Post by bjd on Jan 12, 2024 20:25:10 GMT
There is a French writer called Patrick Manoukian, one of his pennames being Manook. A couple of his books are set in Mongolia and they are great. The first I read is Yeruldelgger -- it's a detective story but gives lots of information about Mongolian culture. I don't know if he has been translated into English.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 14, 2024 20:59:31 GMT
The British movie Scrapper did not get much of a release in France, which is a shame because it is excellent. It is also extremely uncommercial, so I understand the distribution reluctance. Georgie is a 12 year old girl from hell, but she has some mitigating circumstances. Her mother died and she kept it a secret from school and the social workers, so she is living alone at home supporting herself by stealing bicycles with the help of her friend Ali. She is very bad tempered and even beats up her friends for no reason. And then her dad Jason appears, played by 27 year old Harris Dickinson. He has been working in Ibiza all this time, maybe. Why did he abandon partner and daughter? "We were very young." Fuck yeah, they were 15!
It's a very poor part of London, but it really looked quite nice to me, not at all the run down world of Ken Loach. There is a lot of solidarity amog the residents. For example, the young cashier at the grocery store (somewhat reluctantly) records messages for Georgie to play on the telephone when necessry. "We've spoken to her and sorted it all out. It was just a misunderstanding and won't happen again."
Georgie tolerates her mystery father and he in turn tries to do what he can, although he is lacking in the housekeeping department. They slowly warm up to each other. Things might work out in the end.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 17, 2024 6:17:10 GMT
Since I have nothing good to say about Mean Girls and Dream Scenario, I will say nothing at all.
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Post by fumobici on Jan 17, 2024 15:58:00 GMT
That's a shame. The film reviews that are the most entertaining tend to be the vicious teardowns.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 17, 2024 19:08:28 GMT
Poor Things is absolutely astounding. That does not necessarily mean that it makes for pleasurable viewing by a lot of people, but it is full of never-before-seen things. Anybody who has seen other films by Yorgos Lanthimos such as The Lobster or The Favourite will kind of know what to expect, but this time he has upped the ante far beyond his films of the past.
Mad scientist Willem Dafoe creates a new creature from a dead young woman and her unborn baby. To be precise, he transplants the baby's brain. So the new woman, Bella, goes through babyhood and childhood at top speed and becomes a very strange woman indeed. She ends up running off with Mark Ruffalo who teaches her sex, which she calls "furious jumping" but she loves it. This comes in handy when she later becomes a prostitute in Paris.
But it is useless to try to describe the plot. It won the Golden Lion at the Venice film festival and the Golden Globe for best comedy (!). Emma Stone is beyond belief. But what struck me the most was how lush it was visually, notably the set decoration and the costumes, not to mention the fantasy cities and the ocean liner. I suppose that some people will be shocked by all of the vaginas, penises and blood. They probably need to get out more, although it must be admitted that a scene had to be cut to get 'only' an 18 rating in the UK. In France it just has a 'mature audience' warning but no age restriction. Just about every non latin country has put restrictions on it. Apparently the scene where the father takes his two young sons to the brothel so that they can observe "how it is done" broke some UK law. Oh well.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 17, 2024 20:15:25 GMT
I have been interested in this movie ever since I first heard about it. Emma Stone is an interesting choice for the lead, as I consider her to be a very good actress, but I'm also put off by her as she strikes me as cold and even mean.
After having learned of the movie, I came across the book which it is based upon. I'll cover that over in the what we've been reading thread in Library, but suffice to say that it's quite obvious why someone would want to make a movie from it -- someone with vision and not much interested in boundaries. The book contains not one, but two unreliable narrators, with the more plausible one coming at the end of the book & given far less time. The first narrator's version would seem to be the basis for the movie. Interestingly, considering Kerouac's review, there is no graphic or even nearly graphic sex in the book. All is allusion, with nothing spelled out.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 18, 2024 20:20:14 GMT
Sofia Exarchou's Animal could easily be a companion piece to How to Have Sex because it once again concentrates on the Greek tourist industry. However, instead of young drunken British tourists, this time it is about the tired 30-somethings who put on shows in the hotel-clubs to entertain the mostly middle aged tourists from around Europe. Kalia is one of the principal performers and is constantly rehearsing with the others, then doing the show and then wandering around to other hotels where she pretends to be a tourist. It is all very depressing. In fact, she could have easily met Paul Mescal as an additional companion piece of Aftersun. It is probably the least touristy Greek movie I have ever seen because it makes one absolutely not want to go there.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 22, 2024 5:05:02 GMT
Pascal Thomas is known for making easy light comedies, and Le voyage en pyjama is no exception, although this one might be a bit more complicated than usual. Victor has to take his wife to the airport at the last minute which is why he stays in his pyjamas and just a coat. She flies off with a colleague for a seminar somewhere. At the airport, Victor meets the colleague's wife and she confirms that the two are having an affair. No big deal. "I'm going to ride my bike to Compostella. Want to come with me?" Sure, good idea. They set off on their bikes, but Victor poops out along the way because there are too many hills. They're probably no more than about 20 km from their starting point. He just turns around as she disappears in the distance. He stops in a bookstore where there is a literary debate, and then... Well, this turns out not to be a standard movie but a collection of about 25 vignettes, as Victor flits from adventure to adventure without ever going home. Helping his old Latin teacher burgle a house, riding with the lesbian couple on a canal barge (impregnating one of them at their request), helping a girl cheat the train fare, etc. There are about 20 or so cameo appearances by major French actors. It's just a piece of fluff but not at all unpleasant.
Godzilla Minus One was an interesting change of pace. It takes place just after WW2, so the angry lizard is making its first appearance. It bites off a lot of heads and disappears under the sea. Will the Japanese leave it alone? Of course not. So it reappears and totally fucks up part of Tokyo as usual. We also get a nice demonstration of its radioactive breath. The Japanese finally get the upper hand and send the dead creature to the bottom of the ocean. We don't even need to see the final scene of it regenerating in the depths because we know that Godjiro will be back in Japanese movies all through the 1960s and 70.
The special effects were quite good.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 25, 2024 3:30:59 GMT
La tête froide ("Winter Crossing") is another addition to the migrant/refugee genre. Marie lives very close to the Italian border and makes ends meet by trafficking cigarettes. But one night she saves migrant Souleymane and he makes her understand that she could make a lot more money by sneaking migrants across the border. She has the additional advantage of being in a semi relationship with a customs officer who tells her which border posts are manned at night for a small fee. While well made, this movie is obviously too predictable. Things go well until something goes wrong, and on top of that there is a snow storm.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 25, 2024 3:45:41 GMT
In Comme un prince (Like a Prince), Souleyman (not the same person as the previous movie) is an aspiring boxer who wants to go the the Olympics. Those hopes are dashed when he shatters the bones in his hand in a bar fight and on top of that he is sentenced to community service at the château in Chambord. The filming location is probably the main draw of the movie because the plot is very thin. He starts off shoveling shit in the stables, but he works his way up to participating in the medieval spectacle that the château puts on. Also he encounters a tough girl, also doing community service, with promising boxing skills. He trains her on the side while courting love at the château. End of story.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 25, 2024 4:12:44 GMT
I have always suspected Todd Haynes of being neurasthenic, but May December once again seems to confirm it. He makes movies about unhappy dissatisfied people, so here we go. Inspired by the real case from many years ago where a 13 year old boy and his teacher fell in love, the movie picks up 20 years later when a TV movie is in preparation. She went to prison, the tabloids had a field day, but now they are still together with children. They still receive packages of dog shit from time to time. Julianne Moore and Natalie Portman seemed to be acting on autopilot to me. Charles Melton was a bit more interesting.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 25, 2024 21:03:24 GMT
I admit that The Iron Claw was a lot more grim than I expected since I knew nothing about the Von Erich clan, the tyrannical father, th slavish mother, the ultra obedient sons being sent to their doom... What a tragedy! But what scares me even more is how young actors allow their bodies to be totally deformed for "muscular" roles. Thank god most of it just sloughs off later, but they are really putting themselves in danger with all of the training and weight gain. Ever since Zac Efron became a real actor with courageous roles like Ted Bundy, he is very impressive to watch. The others were excellent, too.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 26, 2024 17:29:52 GMT
Ilya Povolotsky is noted for his documentaries, but Blazh (Grace) is his first work of fiction. It actually seems quite like a documentary as a man and his teenage daughter crisscross what appear to be the ugliest blights of Russia in their camper van. They rarely speak and we never even learn their names. The father runs an outdoor cinema where people arrive with their chairs and benches. He also sells DVDs and video cassettes and a few other things. (The daughter asks her father "What's going to hppen when they finally have the internet?") During the screenings, the daughter sells beer and crisps directly from the van. I have rarely seen so many desolate landscapes, particularly along the coast of the Barents Sea, and just like deserts and endless plains, the area starts radiating its own version of dark beauty once it has broken you down. Everything becomes hypnotic, which is probably the main reason that people are able to live there.
There are a few glimmers of hope when they stop in a semi-abandoned meterological station where a woman works alone. And a teen boy they met (he helped to install the screen at one location) is smitten by the girl and follows them in spite of the father's opposition. The girl (age 15) even manages to lose her virginity. Even though she sends the boy away, a new chapter of her life has begun.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 27, 2024 17:57:40 GMT
Captives ("Party of Fools" in English) did not captivate me although the subject is fascinating. A young woman has herself committed to a mental institution in 1894, not because she is mentally disturbed but because she is looking for her mother who has been interned for more than 30 years. It is as much of a horror show as you can imagine. Half a dozen major French actresses are in the movie and they clearly delighted in not wearing any makeup to make them look better. I was particularly shocked by Carole Bouquet who looked like hell, but I see that she is now 66 years old, so all you have to do is remove her movie star makeup.
Anyway, we are given plenty of time to see all of the appalling conditions and appalling staff before we move on to the main course. Back then (true fact!) there was an annual madwomen's ball in one of the asylums which the upper class enjoyed attending. They would choose about 100 of the more presentable mentally ill patients and let the mix with the glitterati of the time. All in good fun of course.
I did not feel entertained.
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Post by kerouac2 on Jan 28, 2024 20:41:18 GMT
Le dernier des Juifs (literally The Last of the Jews but the English title is A Nice Jewish Boy) is of the Jewish family comedy genre (surprise!) which is still going strong in France but which is disappearing in the United States since Woody Allen was cancelled.
Bellisha is 25 years old and lives with his semi-invalid mother. They live in an ordinary lower class suburb of Paris that the mother mostly just sees from the balcony of the flat ("I see so many black people. What happened to all of the arabs?"). Bellisha does all of the shopping and the last kosher butcher has finally closed because the customers are all gone. The synagogue already closed some time ago. This doesn't bother Bellisha because he gets along fine with the others and even has an arab lover on the side. (We only learn near the end that she is married and has a kid.) Anyway, he buys a chicken from the halal butcher, but the mother can tell that it isn't right. She makes him admit where he bought the chicken and says he has to completely decontaminate the kitchen and re-kosher all of the pots and dishes, as well as the refrigerator. He looks this up on YouTube and finds that it means rinsing the items in open running water, a river or lake. So he does it all in the canal.
The mother says they have do their alya, but for her this doesn't necessarily mean moving to Israel but instead to the suburb where her brother lives. Nevertheless, Bellisha contacts the Israeli repatriation office and they come up with all sorts of conditions like where is his certificate of Judaism? There are all sorts of other antics like when the city wants to have an ecumenical event at the synagogue with the local priest and iman. Bellisha has to stand in more or less as the rabbi.
Anyway, I found the movie delightful and was surprised at the cinema -- at 10am on a Sunday morning the auditorium with the biggest screen at the MK2 Nation was practically full. And it was obvious that the "community" was very present because Bellisha's lover would ask things like "say something filthy in Hebrew" when they were screwing. But he didn't speak Hebrew so he would say something which even I recognised as being part of a prayer, and the audience would go into fits of laughter because they actually understood the words.
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