When the going gets tough, even the toughest need a laugh, and Israeli comedy lovers have hit the jackpot this summer as several locally made comedies are coming to theaters. One, Cat’s Luck by Guy Amir and Hanan Savyon, is already bringing big audiences back to the multiplexes.
Back in the 60s and 70s, it was the golden age of bourekas films, crowd-pleasing comedies with broad appeal, classics such as Charlie and a Half, the Kuni Leml series, the Eskimo Limon films, and many others. Israeli comedies never disappeared from local screens entirely, but in the past few years, they have come back with a vengeance, attracting millions of Israelis to the movies and sometimes out-performing international films.
These movies are not meant for sophisticated audiences, and few English speakers ever see them. When Israeli movies go to international film festivals, the comedies almost always stay home. Something about the humor just doesn’t translate, although moviemakers here keep dreaming of it.
But here in Israel, the profits from these hit comedies allow producers to finance dozens of art films. Amir and Savyon’s films have been box-office champs, as was Saving Shuli, the 2021 movie starring the Mah Kashur comedy trio, Tzion Baruch, Asi Israelof, and Shalom Michaelshwilli, which sold over a million tickets during its summer release during the pandemic.
Selling tickets throughout the country
Cat’s Luck, which just started playing in theaters around Israel last week, sold 60,000 tickets on its first weekend, a very high number during this post-COVID wartime era, and reportedly drew 25,000 when it was shown recently on Israeli Cinema Day, which offers previews of upcoming films. Savyon and Amir have been among Israel’s most commercially successful filmmakers for years. They became friends in the Nissan Nativ Acting Studio, and created the popular television series, Asfur, about broke friends living on a farm near Jerusalem. They went on to make two hit movies, Maktub (2017) and Forgiveness (2019), as well as the Netflix series, Bros. The details of their plots differ, but they always play two schlubby best friends who get into all kinds of trouble and then help each other out of it. Like most popular entertainers, there is always a core of sincere sentiment in their movies and television shows and their fans enjoy the moments when they lift each other up as well as the ones when they pull themselves down.
In Cat’s Luck, which was adapted from an Italian comedy, they play brothers-in-law who run a business fixing cable TV connections in Haifa. Reuven (Savyon) is a neurotic guy with a severe lactose allergy who still lives with his mother (Levana Finkelstein) and pines for his old high-school classmate, now a policewoman (Mali Levi). Beni (Amir) is married to Rika (Rotem Abuhav), Reuven’s sister. Their marriage isn’t in the greatest shape – are any marriages ever good in comedies? – and all he wants to do is watch crime dramas, one in particular, a series called Corpse in the Kinneret. It’s a kind of existential, True Detective-style kind of show that he has become obsessed with, and he uses it to explain everything in life, the way many of us do when we binge a series.
Things are bad enough for the two at the beginning, but they have to get much worse so that the plot can get going. One day when they go to on what they think will be a normal job, they stumble onto a mob hit, and it’s a situation where both or either of them could be convicted of the crime. They go for help to the local crime lord (Lior Ashkenazi, and while I’m sure he could play a scary crime boss, he isn’t at all threatening here), who works with his stuttering son (Yossi Marshek), who is poked fun at in a way that is so politically incorrect that even the characters debate whether it’s appropriate. Amir and Savyon bicker and mug their way through the story, and are always at their best when they are needling each other, or, very dimly, trying to figure out what to do in complicated situations. It’s not their best movie, but it’s new, and their fans obviously love it already.
If you’re interested in them but not enough to head for a theater, their previous films are on Netflix. My favorite of all their work is Forgiveness, in which at one point they have to go undercover to a Bedouin village and an Arabic version of “La Bamba” plays while they dance around.
Another upcoming movie aimed at this same lowbrow audience is a movie with the cast of the Goalstar reality TV show, about a soccer team made up of celebrities that crashes in the African jungle, which will open on July 11. It’s pretty clear from the trailer that it will be full of cringe-worthy racial jokes, although there are a few funny ones making fun of the guys for being dumb, like when they write SOS in stones to alert passing planes, only they write it in Hebrew.
One strange footnote to any look at these kinds of Israeli comedies is that they are popular because they express the beliefs and preoccupations of a large sector of the Israeli public, and last year’s comedy hit, The Hilula (aka The 90s – The Revelry) had a plot that seems incredibly disturbing now. Set just after the first Gulf War, it tells the story of a ragtag group of residents of a northern town, led by a character played by Shalom Assayag, who head for Netivot to visit the grave of the Baba Sali, take a wrong turn, and end up in Gaza, where they are kidnapped. It’s filled with laughs and everyone bonds with everyone over the delicious food that a hostage played by Evelin Hagoel prepares, and she even delivers the baby of one of the hostage takers, who names the baby after her in gratitude. Last summer seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it?