The excellent Israeli director Amos Gitai has used this time a script to provide a vehicle for great names like Juliette Biboche, Barbara Hendricks, Jeanne Moreau, but has little to do with any real situation. An Israeli policeman travels to Avignon to attend the funeral of his stepfather. He sleeps on the street amid the homeless but wears a suit for the funeral! His beautiful step sister Ana who has not seen her daughter since early childhood and has not kept any contact with her, discovers that the daughter lives in a settlement in Gaza. Quite strange, the late father of Ana did visit his granddaughter occasionally! Instantly Ana travels to Gaza, succeeds to penetrate the sealed-off territory from which religious settlers were to be evacuated and wanders amid these settlers until she founds her daughter. The film has some beautifully filmed moments depicting the confusion, religious frenzy of settlers and cold blood of the policemen involved, but otherwise is very close to the usually sold kitch.
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erica-34 December 2008
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DICK STEEL19 April 2009For an Amos Gitai film, I thought this had the most impactive prologue amongst those that I've watched to date, which succinctly sums up the political themes that his films often explore. While it might have thrusted you right into the thick of (in)action, you'll soon realize that he has a tremendous ability to gift wrap his points amongst the most mundane and ordinary.
A Dutch-Palestinian lady gets chatted up by a French Israeli man on a train. They share a cigarette moment, and soon realize that they have a lot more in common than they initially realized. The two strangers's chance meeting soon turn into lust/love at first sight, probably a nod in the direction that even amongst what would be perceived as the most irreconcilable groups of people, can find common ground and understanding, and kiss and make up. Only that there are those in the world like the authorities wielding some power, could make unreasonable demands to try and derail peace efforts, like that train soldier who might have stepped out of his boundary in asserting and demanding that he be listened to and complied with.
Alas the movie failed to keep the pace with its wonderful opening, and for the most parts the build up to the finale sagged heavily under very dire straits stemming from an uninteresting plot which failed to capitalize on the Israeli man Uli (Liron Levo) whom we got introduced, but shifted its attention to the more illustrious Juliette Binoche's Ana, Uli's half sister whom he is meeting in France because of their father's demise, and to discover just what his will entailed. The story found it necessary to go through an entire backstory for nothing, only for us to know little red herring nuggets of information such as Ana's estranged relationship with her separated husband whom we do not see on screen, and that slightly incestuous (well, not exactly) temptations that both Uli and Ana go through, with the latter being the temptress.
It tried to address issues like staying with someone who you don't love, only out of convenience, which Ana confessed to be doing, because she's a lazy soul. But in fact her character flits into mood swings one end to the other, that it's not tough to understand how unappealing she can get, good looker or not. Things start to pick up slightly midway through the film when the actual seed of the story was sown, with the reading of the deceased's will, having to instruct Ana to travel to Gaza to pass on her dad's inheritance to her abandoned daughter Dana (Dana Ivgy) in person.
So begins a road trip for the siblings, which is convenient anyway because Uli was beginning to fade away like a side show, and his return to Israel gives him a chock load of things to do, since he's a police officer, and have been given orders, together with the army, to clear Gaza of its Israeli settlers since Israel has pulled out of the Gaza Strip. Ordering your fellow men off their plot of land and homes are never easy, and this story arc provides that "action packed"moment in Disengagement. The other thread would be of course Ana's quest in locating her daughter, like finding a needle in the perennial haystack, made more difficult because she doesn't speak the language of her countrymen. The story arcs tangent off at this point, but you know there'll definitely be moments for a collision course later in the film.
Through Uli's eyes we see how their evacuation operation gets carried out, having to be compassionate, yet stern in a thankless job that involves ejecting by any means possible the settlers who are protesting their rights. One involves grabbing the people and forcing them onto chartered buses to take them back to the mainland, and on the other having heavy machinery either bulldoze everything insight, or the utilization of cranes to literally lift homes off the soil. One can imagine if one is forced away from your home at the snap of a finger, and that is definitely something difficult to swallow.
Disengagement unfortunately is like a self-fulling prophecy, having the middle portion starkly dragging against the powerful prologue and finale. If only it could find a better gel to stick both ends together in a more engaging fashion. -
johno-2116 January 2008I recently saw this at the 2008 Palm Springs International Festival of Films. This is a good film by veteran filmmaker, director and writer Amos Gitai and it's interesting to see an event that was recently an international news story recreated in a feature film. The film's title comes from the 2005 forced evacuation of Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip by Israel in a move that rather than calling it giving up the Gaza the government of Israel referred to it as disengagement. The film begins on a train when a beautiful Palestinian woman shares conversation and a cigarette with a handsome Israeli man. They each have several different ethnic backgrounds to their genealogy bu Israeli and Palestinian are what stand out. "We're all Bedouin's" the woman flatly observes referring to the Arab and non-Arab nomadic tribes of the Middle East. The film then turns to it's storyline about a Israeli soldier Uli (Leron Levo) returning to his father's home in France for his funeral. His sister Ana (Juliette Binoche) is also there for the funeral and finds out that the daughter Dana (Dana Ivgy) that she gave up is a schoolteacher at a Kibbutz on the Gaza who Ana's father had been in contact with and wanted to leave a large part of his estate to. The funeral features a strange scene with American soprano Barbara Harris singing over the old man's body. An American black woman who now lives in Sweden singing a German opera over the corpse of a French-Jew is rather odd. Harris in reality is a champion of human rights and works closely as a UN Ambassador for Life for refugee causes so the director uses this to underscore the plight of those in the Gaza who were forced to leave during the Israeli pullout. Levo's acting is a little flat and uninspired and Binoche's acting is over the top and is in fact over acting. The story set in France gets a little dull at times but becomes energized once they arrive in Gaza. Uli on duty to evacuate settlers and Ana to find her daughter. I would give this a 7.0 out of 10.
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richardxrowley8 July 2011I saw this two days ago with a smallish crowd on a large campus (the usual Wednesday night group); a couple people walked out. I think several people were baffled by it (as to some extent even the prior reviewers were). The Juliette Binoche character (Ana) is bipolar: her behavior conforms(!?) to what I've experienced over the years in dealing with bipolar women (bipolar men are more likely to be angry/violent and therefore to get in legal trouble sooner or later). When you understand this, a LOT more of the film makes sense: Binoche's 'over-the-top performance', the subdued (non)reponse of the stepbrother, her foolish attempt to forge a new will for her dead father, her long-ago decision(?) to abandon her daughter in Israel, her odd 'decision' to divorce her husband (without telling him that), the fear of her antics that drove Uli to sleep in the basement with the winos rather than in the apartment with her etc. The various 'disengagements' in the film include: death, divorce, non-communication, the abandonment of an infant, the decision to sleep in the basement etc. The nature of Ana's malady is never addressed, even indirectly). The 'German aria' could have been Yiddish, fairly likely as the father was originally from Albany New York so might well have spoken Yiddish with his parents and thus would have wanted that at his wake/funeral. But since I have no Yiddish, I could be mistaken on the point. Not an easy film to take (Ana has to be endured and Uli is too hidebound for us to identify with him as much as we might like), but the film is very philosophical. And it takes you INSIDE the disengagement from Gaza: we see it from the military AND settler point of views. The very opposite of a 'feel good movie'.
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Although nominally about Israel's 2005 evacuation of settlements in Gaza, the bulk of the 2007 film "Disengagement" takes place in France. Uli (Liron Levo), an Israeli policeman, travels to Avignon for his wealthy adoptive father's funeral. There, he reunites with his flighty sister Ana (Juilette Binoche). In his will, Uli and Ana's father leaves most of his property to Dana (Dana Ivgy), the daughter Ana gave birth to when in her early teens. Dana currently lives on an Israeli settlement in Gaza. Per her father's instructions, Ana must travel there to meet the adult daughter she has not seen since infancy.
"Disengagement" is very short on dialog and exposition. Many questions -- like, "Who is this person?" "Why is she singing opera?" and "Why is she acting like that?" -- arise, but few are answered. Scenes and shots, on the other hand, tend to be very long and very static. This style of filmmaking does allow emotions and meanings to emerge nonverbally from characters and settings, but few scenes in "Disengagement" really benefit from this treatment.
Aside from a brief encounter between Uli and a Palestinian woman he meets while traveling to France, all of the film's strongest scenes come during its final 15-20 minutes, as Israeli police prepare to remove settlers from Gaza and then begin doing so. The initial encounter between Ana and her long-lost daughter Dana is touching as well, but, as with everything else in this film, drags on far too long.
"Disengagement" would probably make a good short story or novella, but as a film it is a failure. Don't waste your time. -
steven9866422 July 2012Saw this on cable and it caught all of our attention immediately. The raw emotion of it will not let you stop watching it. You cannot help but put yourself into the plight(s) of this movie. I would recommend watching it if you are at all curious. Juliette is always captivating and very much so in this film. You get to see things in Israel how they happened with the plight of the settlers and the inside police view. It is a different perspective to present since it is kind of an inside view of the circumstances. This movie is OK for kids and adults to view in our opinion. It may bore the kids though... Some of this is subtitled and some is in English. Enough of English so that it keep our families attention since subtitled doesn't seem to go over.
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docmusimdb11 November 2008I saw this movie at a Jewish film Festival and it looked interesting on paper. However, from the strange opening scene where the protagonist, a French Israeli gets into conversation on a train with a Dutch Palestinian woman and after a brief interlude with a passport inspecting official he and the woman start kissing passionately, the movie got more and more bizarre, seemingly for bizarre's sake. The fact that there is no further reference in the movie to that Palestinian woman is an indication either that the director forgot that he put that scene in or that he had no intention of making a movie which made sense. Similar bizarre scenes involve an American black woman singing operatic songs in German over the dead body of the protagonist's father. She sings beautifully but there is no explanation of who she is or why she is there in the first place. Dangling from the ceiling around the father's dead body are dreidles and menorahs - Jewish symbols which have absolutely no place around the dead bodies of either observant or vehemently non-observant Jews. Juliet Binoche, playing the sister or rather adoptive stepsister of the protagonist spends most of the first half of the film apparently trying to seduce her stepbrother. While the scene of her flaunting her admittedly very attractive naked body in front of him behind a darkened doorway is of great prurient interest, it doesn't lead to any actual plot developments or insight. Many other seemingly isolated scenes in the first half of the movie just left me wondering what the point was supposed to be. The second half of the movie, set at the time of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza but preposterously involving the Juliette Binoche character going to Gaza to meet her long estranged daughter is somewhat less puzzling than the first half. However, it tediously portrays the actions of the soldiers and the settlers with no new insights into the nature of the conflict or the issues involved. I would have thought that an Israeli director would have something more to say about the disengagement than just that it happened. I watched this movie with my 18-year-old daughter and it was so bad that it has put her off going to the rest of the film Festival. I can't blame her.
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TemporaryOne-121 February 2017Disengagement sails through and melts mental and emotional and physical boundaries.
Dutch-Palestinians, French-Israelis, an American living in Sweden performing in German who works with refugees worldwide for the UN (Barbra Hendricks), Orthodox Jews cultivating life in Canaan.
The journey begins with a fixed, normalized prelude to a transcultural tryst punctuated by a molecular twist that expresses the grand themes of the film, glides through an urban Avignon landscape that could readily be the urban landscape of Gaza City or Tel Aviv or Singapore or Chicago or Los Angeles or London or Cape Town or Dubai or Naples, languidly lilts in choreography through the lush vermilion interiour of an Avignon estate owned by a deceased French Jew whose death brings together his hypersensual sophisticated Dutch-Palestinian daughter (who resonates the biblical Delilah) and solemn French-Israeli son (an adopted step-son who resonates with the biblical Samson as he evades her sybaritic act of seduction), and from that moment forward the film showcases womankind on the verge of a mental breakdown because of barriours (erected by whom?) of interiour fires that are smiting her already-burnt-out identity.
From the stable, controlled, prosperity of her Avignon life, Ana, a disengaged Dutch-Palestinian who thinks herself a coward who has died many times before her death, takes emotional flight as she embarks on a transcontinental voyage to the 2000 heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Gaza. There resides her life-pulse - her Palestinian heritage and the daughter she abandoned as a child, an Orthodox Jewish resident of Gaza who is being forcibly disengaged from her Palestinian homeland. Her inner turmoil externalizes itself and blazes forth in wave after wave of passionate emotion the closer and closer she approaches the soil of Gaza, the flesh of her daughter, and the soul of her ancestry. As Israelis betray Israelis, and Palestinians betray Palestinians, and both betray each other, the landscape is completely ruptured and deterritorialized, the pillars of life in Gaza are pulled down, our identities are stripped away, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jewish-Palestinian identity struggles and patriarchal hierarchy are shattered, and all that is left are these new lines of unregulated emotions and human relationships which are destined to shatter all further resistance and counterattacks and disengagement.
Place to place, religion to religion, culture to culture, multicultures interweaving into hybrid polycultures, we circumnavigate this globe throughout our lives, we become disengaged from who we are and who we were and who we will be, the forces of life compelling us to absorb all identities and histories, the forces of life compelling those same identities and histories to melt away into one undeniable truth - we are all of the same flesh and blood, our history and culture and identity are shared, and only through disengagement can we perceive reality with clarity, and only through disengagement can we shatter the stranglehold of the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock and shatter the borders and begin to construct one united plane of existence.
Amos presented the crux of the Israel/Arab issue brilliantly. The decision to say, okay, fine, you win, we'll kick all the undesirables out of Gaza to make you happy, we'll make sure that all Arabs stay here and all Jews stay there and none of you have to ever engage each other again, out of sight out of mind no more engagement no more interaction, we'll ignore the fact that your histories and cultures and religions and societies are irrevocably engaged/fused-together, we'll ignore the fact that your very flesh and bone is bone and the same, we'll ignore the fact that disengagement (emotional and psychological and political and religious and cultural and social, not merely physical exile) is the very reason why the Israeli-Arab conflict began, we'll ignore the fact that "disengagement" acts in opposition to the very goals the people who want "disengagement" claim to pursue, we'll ignore the fact that you can't create a stable society when the cornerstone of the society is predicated upon disengagement, you can't solve any of the issues in this world by "disengaging", disengagement is antithetical to existence, to creation, to communication, to building cross-cultural coalitions across the planet, to perpetuating humanity.
Barbra Hendricks has lived throughout Europe, she's of African descent, a minority diaspora, like diaspora Jews and Palestinians and others. The significance of her presence parallels and re-enforces the film's questions and themes. She is an avatar for Amos Gitai: consider his own "disengaged" statelessness/rootlessness: Israeli Jew constantly on the move, dual citizen of France, speaks multiple languages, artistically productive on a far-reaching scale, political/social activist, his films an operatic lament over retrogression and depravity and failures within the political/social/cultural canvases of Judaism and Israel, Hendricks singing over loss of a Worldly American-European Jew who lived beyond boundaries. She is a also a foil to Ana - the former decided to be a citizen of the world and left the US and lived her life to the fullest, the latter (Ana) became trapped in confusion over her identity, dispossessed and disengaged and alienated and drifting. Hendricks and Gitai are trying to heal the dispossessed and disengaged of the world, and they speak in many languages to achieve this goal, the language of music and cinema, the language of compassion and humanity, the language of politics and society, the languages of American and French and Italian and German and Hebrew and Arab....
Compare Hendricks to the Palestinian and Israeli (specifically, ultra-Orthodox Jewry) - they feel they cannot live, cannot exist, unless they live self-autonomously in their (shared) ancestral homeland, their sole goal the achievement of self-determination within their historic homeland, without which they feel they are being ground under foot and obliterated from the tables of memory. Hendricks represents the opposite, people who never let boundaries/demographics define them, people who feel their home is the entire world, possibilities endless, people who do not allow themselves to be solely defined by borders and ancestries and geographical locations, people who engage themselves with the world in its entirety. -
Nozz9 August 2010The movie starts with a long conversation that seems written solely to enable a character to complain that the Arabs of Palestine are not recognized as a distinct nation although (contends this character, who is never seen again) they have been one for hundreds of years. It continues with a long interlude of existential/claustrophobic drama in a large house in Avignon occupied by the fresh corpse of an old professor, his frequently and unaccountably merry daughter, and his adopted son from Israel, with whom the daughter flirts. This interlude fails perhaps because the actors seldom have a line in their native language and therefore can't summon up the mojo to give the cryptic relationships interest. Then it appears that according to the old man's will, to which the daughter unsuccessfully tries to forge a change, the daughter must now go visit her own abandoned daughter who lives in Gaza in a Jewish settlement which the son already has military orders to coincidentally, at the very same time, go help dismantle. The dismantling of the settlement, re-enacted up the coast at Nitzanim, looks reasonably realistic, at least if you judge by the news footage of the time. A fairly large troupe of bit players does justice to the soldiers and the settlers, and the camera conveys the atmosphere well. As the old man's daughter meets her own daughter and they, at least briefly, lose one another again during the evacuation, is their relationship supposed to symbolize something about the political situation? Or vice versa? What do the scenes in Gaza have to do with the matters raised in the Avignon scenes? A viewer is tempted to think that perhaps Gaza was introduced for no reason but to link an otherwise boring and incomplete movie to a hot item from the recent news pages.
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SnoopyStyle26 June 2016In Avignon, Ana (Juliette Binoche) is a flighty woman estranged from her husband. Her father lies in state. She's overjoyed when her adopted brother Uli joins her at the funeral. They try to forge their father's will. The attorney dismisses their forgery and produces the real will. It states that Ana must reconnect with her daughter whom she abandoned in a Gaza kibbutz as a teenager. She arrives just as the authorities are schedule to take down the Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip.
First, it takes a long time for the drama to start. It's not until the reading of the will after forty minutes that the drama really gets going. Before that, it's a slow meandering story. It's also a weird way to get at the Gaza issue. It seems a side entry into this important issue. Once there, it does some interesting things. -
TheLittleSongbird12 October 2017Will be honest off the bat about not caring for any of the films in Amos Gitai's "Border Trilogy" (the other two being 2004's 'Promised Land' and 2005's 'Free Zone'), seeing them mainly because they had interesting subjects and performers (Rosamund Pike, Natalie Portman and Juliette Binoche primarily) responsible for some great work.
That being said, all three films have their merits but also a lot of faults. All three are examples of films that dealt with heavy, sensitive and brave subjects but could have done much more with them and handled them more compellingly and tactfully. Of the three, 2007's 'Disengagement' may be the best, being by far the best-looking and having a few moving, emotionally impactful moments that the other two lacked. Mostly though, the execution was wanting and it mostly left me disengaged.
'Disengagement' does have good things. As said, it is the best-looking of the trilogy, which is saying a lot seeing as 'Free Zone' in particular was visual chaos. There were however some beautiful images here and also some harrowing ones that will stay with me for a while. The scenery again is atmospheric and evocative. Again, another attraction is the soundtrack. Not only is it very well-composed and full of atmosphere and sheer beauty, it really adds and even enhances the mood, giving an emotional wallop.
Considering what they were given, the actors do a good job. Particularly Hiam Abbass on movingly dignified form and Jeanne Moreau. Operatic soprano Barbara Hendricks also impresses. Like 'Promised Land', the opening scene of 'Disengagement' was very promising, but the highlight story-wise is the poignant last 15-20 minutes.
However, despite the great opening and ending the film in between is messy. 'Disengagement' is never as distasteful or gratuitously salacious as 'Promised Land' or as preachy and confusing as 'Free Zone', but a lot of it is long-winded and dull. Particularly the first half which often goes nowhere, goes on for much too long and relies on the interaction of the actors which is not always very natural. The Gaza scenes are a little less drawn out, but are hardly illuminating or insightful and get heavy-handed and far too one-sided. It can be hard to follow too and feels very disorganised, as well as the two halves being far too much of a disconnect to each other (having little to no relevance to each other), but doesn't feel incomplete like 'Free Zone' did.
Script-wise, 'Disengagement' is very stilted, rambling and is one of the most bizarre for any film seen by me for a while. The character development is mostly very flimsy and extraneous, as aimless as the film's first half. There are exceptions to the acting, Binoche herself and Leron Levo, she trying too hard and he not enough. Once again, Gitai directs in a way that is suggestive of the concept of subtlety being completely alien to him.
In conclusion, some good things and the best of "The Border Trilogy" but mostly left me disengaged. 5/10 Bethany Cox -
Maybe it's fashionable for people to listen to paint drying whilst off their heads on cocaine these days; it's the only reason I could think that would make this movie even tolerable. Boring disconnected dialogues, focussing on the irrelevant whilst skimming through what should be important plot elements (for the little plot that there actually is).
In a nutshell, this movie is the visual equivalent of really bad elevator music - something that leaves you feeling like your senses and your time have, wondering how you allowed yourself to be exposed to it.