Thanks to the miracle of subtitles, you don’t have to understand Hebrew to follow the Israeli documentary “Souvenirs.” But you’ll get a lot more out of it if you can read between the lines.
It’s easy enough to describe the contours of this offbeat little road movie, which combines a father and son’s late-in-life bonding expedition with a slender history lesson. But what isn’t said, or is deflected or glossed over, is a lot more provocative than what’s onscreen.
“Souvenirs,” the winner of the Israeli Academy Award for best documentary of 2006, screens three times in the San Francisco International Film Festival.
The movie begins with Shahar Cohen, an Israeli filmmaker in his mid-30s with neither professional accomplishments nor a family to his credit, fending off affectionate but pointed digs from his octogenarian Yemeni father.
They go to a reunion of the elderly remnants of the Jewish Brigade, the battalion that fought the Nazis in the last months of World War II and later smuggled refugees and survivors to Palestine and became the foundation of the Israel Defense Forces.
Cohen’s father, Sleiman, was one of those soldiers, and he thinks a documentary would serve the double function of honoring the Brigade’s forgotten legacy and jump-starting Shahar’s stalled career.
Shahar is indifferent to the idea until Sleiman reveals that he had a couple of lovers in Holland after the war and — who knows — he may have left behind a few souvenirs, or children. So Shahar and Sleiman set off on a car trip across Europe to the Netherlands.
Sleiman is gregarious but not particularly reflective. We are given to understand that he was a fighter and a lover in his day, and a man of substance.
Shahar, on the other hand, intentionally washed out of the army after two months. In both his mind and Sleiman’s, it’s plain that he doesn’t measure up to his father.
As they motor along, stopping at a key Jewish Brigade battlefield in Italy and picking up a pair of German hitchhikers heading to Amsterdam, the filmmaker intersperses archival footage and bits of narration about the Brigade. The heroism of those Jewish soldiers is still impressive, and puts Shahar even more in the shade.
However, as Sleiman divulges more of his activities in those days, his pedestal develops cracks. It turns out he carried the wounded during the big battle, hardly a minor function but one that doesn’t fit the image of the bold, brave soldier that Shahar has carried all his life.
Shahar is an attentive son who treats his father with respect and even sweetness. But his unwillingness to push Sleiman on topics like his failed marriage to Shahar’s mother or his Dutch girlfriends, robs the film of both tension and weight.
Shahar is well aware of the darker threads in “Souvenirs,” but he’s chronically reluctant to explore them. Faced with a choice between cold, hard truth and sentimentality, he picks the latter.
Compounding the misjudgment, Cohen and co-director Halil Efrat use a treacly soundtrack and maudlin snatches of music, like Judy Garland’s “Embraceable You,” to underscore the heart-tugging moments or finesse the gritty ones in the film’s Amsterdam section.
That said, the filmmakers don’t push the movie, which clocks in at just 75 minutes, beyond its modest ambitions. “Souvenirs” is competing for a Golden Gate Award in the documentary category, but I can’t help feeling that the most compelling footage was left in the cutting room.
“Souvenirs” screens at 3:30 p.m. Sunday, April 29 at the Pacific Film Archive, 2575 Bancroft Way, Berkeley; and 3:15 p.m. Monday, May 7 and 9:15 p.m. Wednesday, May 9 at the Sundance Cinemas Kabuki, 1881 Post St., S.F. Tickets: $8-$12 at www.sffs.org, (925) 866-9559, the Kabuki or the festival ticket outlet on the lobby level of One Embarcadero Center.