“The Holy Land,” like 90 percent of all movies set in Jerusalem, portrays a collision between faith and the real world.
Eitan Gorlin’s calculated tale of a virginal rabbinical student falling for a prostitute aggressively tramples a fistful of taboos and pushes a number of buttons.
A young director’s attempt to distill the entire Middle East dynamic into a handful of one-dimensional characters, “The Holy Land” is a textbook case of a film generating more heat than light. Engrossing but hardly enlightening, “The Holy Land” is best viewed as a provocative conversation-starter.
“The Holy Land” opens today around the Bay Area.
The movie is structured as the coming of age of a nebbishy yeshiva bocher, Mendy (Oren Rehany, making his feature film debut), whose interest in sex is getting in the way of his studies.
Surprisingly, Mendy’s rabbi advises him to visit a prostitute — a non-Jewish one, preferably — in another city. Presumably once his libido and curiosity are satisfied, Mendy will return with his commitment renewed.
Only Mendy falls for the first girl he sets eyes on in a Tel Aviv brothel. Sasha (Tchelet Semel) is 19, Russian, pretty and nowhere near as innocent as she seems. In fact, she has infinitely more real-world experience than this boychick she sees through in a glance.
That same night, Mendy meets an American who also favors Sasha’s services. Broad-shouldered and gregarious, Mike (Saul Stein) is almost a caricature of the backslapping, loudmouth American.
He has a bar in Jerusalem called, coincidentally, “Mike’s Place,” and in short order Mendy starts working there as a bartender. In fact, “The Holy Land” is loosely based on Gorlin’s novella, “Mike’s Place, A Jerusalem Diary,” drawn from his experiences working at the pub.
The regulars at Mike’s include a middle-aged settler who’s never without his rifle and a mysterious Arab dealer of, well, we’re not sure if it’s stolen property or drugs or something worse.
Mendy gets some lessons in human nature, and they’re not all pretty. Sasha resists his immature plays at romance, preferring Mike’s casual cynicism and no-strings sex to Mendy’s earnest overtures and long-term plans.
Although “The Holy Land” is ostensibly Mendy’s story, Sasha is far and away the more compelling figure. Thanks to a screenplay that continually reveals more depth and shadows to her character, and Tchelet Semel’s ice-and-fire performance, Sasha is the only three-dimensional person in the film.
When she lambastes Mendy for his naïve, half-baked dreams of some blissful future life together, it’s easily the best scene in the movie.
“The Holy Land” posits a brutish, sordid world where everybody’s out for themselves. Mendy comes to see that the circumscribed rules of the yeshiva — and, by extension, the rigid laws of Orthodox Judaism — afford some measure of insulation and protection from the nastiness of contemporary society.
Ultimately, though, “The Holy Land” suggests that faith only carries you so far. The film’s title is clearly meant to be ironic: In Jerusalem, nobody is immune from profane reality.
“The Holy Land” opens today at the Lumiere in San Francisco, the Shattuck in Berkeley, Century Cinema 16 in Mountain View, Camera 3 in San Jose and CineArts in Sausalito, and October 17 at the Rialto Lakeside in Santa Rosa.