Talya Lavie’s characters get under your skin and can be annoying, the way real people are often annoying (even if you love them). It was true in her feature film debut, Zero Motivation, about malcontented female soldiers at a base in the Negev, and it’s just as true in her latest movie, Honeymood (in Hebrew, it’s called “Ehad Ba’Lev”), which opens in Israel on July 22.
This lively and engaging film is a black comedy that seems to be heavily influenced by the Martin Scorsese film After Hours. That film is about a nocturnal odyssey through downtown New York that is dark in every sense of the word, while Lavie’s film is very similar in tone although it is set in Jerusalem. It begins at the point where most romantic comedies end – right after the wedding – and it can be described as an anti-romantic comedy. In most rom-coms, you are rooting for the couple to get together, but here I mostly hoped that they would break up.
There are a couple of moments of fairly conventional slapstick, as the bride, Elinor (Avigail Harari), a glittery-eyed bundle of energy, insists that she and her low-key groom, Noam (Ran Danker), leave their lavish honeymoon suite and go back in again, with him carrying her over the threshold properly. She is still in her wedding dress and he in his suit. They get locked out, but that’s the least of their problems. More troubling is a letter she finds in his jacket from his former girlfriend, which contains a ring that Elinor insists he must return right away and this errand sends them out into the night. They find themselves, like Alice going down the rabbit hole, adrift in the city as their quest turns out to be much more complicated than they originally thought.
But more than the external complications – it turns out they are each other’s rebound relationship and both have an ostensibly far more suitable ex not far away – their trek across Jerusalem reveals much that they don’t want to see about each other, and about themselves. This is a version of the common feeling of newlyweds who are not sure they have made the right choice, magnified 10,000 times.
Elinor is a drama teacher and a drama queen who seems to be trying to talk herself into believing that the “good guy” she married is really good for her. Noam indulges her whims up to a point but keeps deciding he has had enough – only to come right back for more. These characters play with extreme stereotypes of certain kinds of men and women: the taciturn, dependable but unexciting guy vs the emotional, irrational but fascinating woman. It is refreshing to see a movie about the war between the sexes where the story is personal, not political.
The first 15 minutes or so of the movie, set in the hotel, play like a short film, a genre in which Lavie has excelled in the past, especially in her surreal short film about a waitress in a cafe by the beast (mifletzet) sculpture in the Kiryat Yovel neighborhood of Jerusalem, Shibolet Bakafe. Gradually, the film moves outward and makes good use of its setting. There are a number of running jokes and comic set pieces, some of which work better than others. Many of them play off against the contrast between the beautiful picture the couple presents and the reality of their complex relationship.
They also expose a side of Jerusalem rarely seen on film, the secular city filled with film students, partying teens and night workers. A particularly dark joke about the groom giving a religious cab driver a blessing that goes horribly awry works well, as does a brief but very well done musical number lampooning the hotness of the guards at the Prime Minister’s Residence. For me, though, the comic high point was a sequence when they visit a film school – clearly the Jerusalem Sam Spiegel Film & Television School, where Lavie studied – to see Elinor’s former flame, Michael (Elisha Banai), a classic narcissist who is editing his graduation film, in a pointed satire of typical student movie projects.
Not all of it works, though. At times, the pacing seems off and you begin to feel as exhausted as the couple must be. A few jokes – such as when the groom’s parents (Orly Silbersatz, who happens to be Elisha Banai’s mother, and Meir Suissa, who starred in such Israeli classics as The Troupe) show up and bring him home for dinner – feel like sitcom fodder. Elinor starts out over the top and gradually settles down, but from the first five minutes you start thinking that this couple has no business being together, an unusual and risky way to open, because it challenges us not to care whether they stay together.
Avigail Harari, who was so good in Avi Nesher’s The Other Story, is completely convincing as an unhinged woman who can’t control her emotions. Ran Danker is so handsome he seems a bit miscast as the dull, stable guy. Elisha Banai is particularly effective as the preening film student.
The late New Yorker magazine critic Pauline Kael wrote these lines about the comedy Splash, and they describe Honeymood as well: “The picture is frequently on the verge of being more wonderful than it is – more lyrical, a little wilder. That verge isn’t a bad place to be, though.” The parts where the film takes its absurdly comic deep dives work the best, and I wished there were a few more of them. Lavie is one of the funniest directors working in Israel today and one of the only ones who even attempts any kind of sophisticated humor. Her debut feature, Zero Motivation, displayed incredible directorial assurance. If she stumbles at times in Honeymood, it’s probably because relationships are tough on all of us, and so is saying something new about them.