Nina's Tragedies
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Nina’s Tragedies (in Hebrew האסונות של נינה) is a 2003 Israeli comedy/drama directed by Savi Gavison and starring Ayelet July Zurer, Yoram Hattab, Alon Abutbul and Shmil Ben Ari. It was first released in 2004. 35mm, color, 110 min.
It is the winner of 11 Awards of the Israeli Film Academy (Best Actress, Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Director, Best Editing, Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Sound, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress).
In his funny, sad, and thoroughly engrossing bittersweet comedy, director Savi Gabizon shows why this highly original coming-of-age story walked away with 11 Israeli Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actress, and Best Director.
Fourteen-year-old Nadav is hopelessly in love with his sexy aunt Nina (Ayelet Zurer), who has recently lost her husband and is clueless about Nadav’s affections. He’s also caught between the two worlds of his divorced parents: his mother is a high-strung fashionista, while his father has recently become devoutly Orthodox and has withdrawn from the family in order to roam the gritty streets of Tel Aviv in a van, cheerfully blasting the word of God through loudspeakers.
The film is told in flashback, as the family packs the boy off to live with his lonely aunt, unaware of his enormous crush on her. Nadav suffers as Nina falls for a man her own age, and he struggles over whether to reconcile with his father. Nina’s Tragedies perfectly captures that time in adolescence when one is old enough to wander around freely and observe the emotional and sexual activities of adults, and young enough not to be caught in their quagmire.
Gabizon (Shuru, Lovesick on Nana Street) has a deft talent for mixing humor with drama and the trivial with the momentous. He masterfully directs a strong ensemble cast, and explores the tenuous but fierce connections between lovers, parents, and children.
From: http://www.sfjff.org/sfjff24/movies/index.php?PrgramOrder=02
Birth. Death. Life. Love. Marriage. Divorce. Infatuation. Passion. Joy. Heartbreak. And dancing Hassids! Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of Nina's Tragedies, writer/director Savi Gabizon's serio-comic look at an Israeli teenager's coming-of-age and his attraction to his beautiful but emotionally fragile Aunt Nina.
Winner of 11 Israeli Academy prizes (including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay) as well as Best Film and Best Screenplay awards at the Jerusalem International Film Festival, Nina's Tragedies takes place over an intensely emotional six months in the life of 14 year-old Nadav (AVIV ELKABETS). The film unfolds through a series of funny and touching journal entries in which Nadav reminisces about this turbulent period in his family�s history--from his high-strung Uncle Haimon�s (YORAM HATTAV) untimely death to the passing of his estranged, deeply religious father, Amnon (SHMIL BEN-ARI).
After Haimon is killed in a terrorist attack, Nadav is asked by his wild, recently divorced mother Alona (ANAT WAXMAN), to move in with her sister, Nina (AYELET JULY ZURER), to provide comfort while Nina mourns the death of her new husband, Haimon. Nadav is only too happy to comply, as he's infatuated with his stunning aunt, with whom he shares a special friendship--not to mention a secret, adolescent crush.
But as Nina gets over her loss and finds solace with a handsome but eccentric photographer named Avinoam (ALON ABOUTBOUL), Nadav feels unexpectedly betrayed and must find a way to reconcile his hormonally charged emotions. At the same time, his best friend Menahem (DOV NAVON)--a kind of grown-up version of Nadav--has found love with a sultry Russian immigrant named Galina (JENYA DODINA), leaving Nadav alone to pursue the "peeping tom" exploits he once shared with the sex-obsessed Menahem.
The sensitive Nadav eventually finds his way, forced to mature quickly and irrevocably, as the fallible, often disappointing adults around him go through their own "growing pains".
By turns profound and whimsical, sexy and surprising, Nina's Tragedies is ultimately about unconditional acceptance--and the power of love to heal.
Unlike Dover Koshashvili's Late Marriage, another Israeli film about conflicted affairs of the heart, Savi Gavison's Nina's Tragedies exhibits scant political subtext throughout its tale of romance, obsession, heartache, and the therapeutic effects of love. Young Nadav (Aviv Elkabeth) is a remote, bookish kid who, along with his older peeping-tom friend Menahem (Dov Navon), likes to gawk at nude women through his bedroom window, though his true infatuation is with his aunt Nina (Ayelet Zurer), the beautiful sister of his flamboyant, promiscuous mother. Told in flashback as Nadav's withdrawn father Amnon (Shmil Ben Ari)—a devout missionary separated from his wife—reads Nadav's diary, Gavison's tragicomedy is modest in scope but not necessarily ambition, a small story of familial ups and downs that achieves a tender, jagged whimsicality through its dedication to idiosyncratic character development and quirky coincidences. Humor and sorrow are constantly colliding in this conflict-wracked country, such as when Nina seemingly spies the ghost of her dead husband Haimon (Yoram Hattab) walking naked down the street or when the pseudo-Oedipal Nadav (who also narrates the film) is allowed to share a bed with his desirable but unattainable aunt. Nadav is asked by his mother to move in with Nina after she's widowed, yet is wounded when she quickly begins a romance with the sensitive military informant (Alon Abutbul's Avinoam) who had notified her of her husband's demise. Gavison's touchingly eccentric film—winner of 11 Israeli Academy Awards—traces the romantic entanglements of Nina, her nephew, his father, Menahem, and Nina's unexpected forthcoming baby (the film's most obvious symbol of emotional rebirth) with a kind of rueful smirk that speaks to the director's awareness of life's imperfections. Less ideal is the script's hoary framing device and nondescript portrait of Nadav, who's presumably meant to be the director's (or audience's) surrogate—after all, he's a voyeur who watches most of the action through the filter of a transparent screen—but whose featureless construction acts like a deadweight on the otherwise buoyant film. Still, as Nina's Tragedies' somber opening scene lyrically imparts via a persistently squeaky and wobbly wheel (on, tellingly, a funeral home corpse cart), the path to the grave is often a bumpy fusion of the serene and the shrill.
By Nick Schager © slant magazine, 2005.
Source: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/film_review.asp?ID=1503
