Sometimes a film’s first few shots tell you almost
everything you need to know. Consider the case of “Off-White Lies,” the 2011
directorial feature debut of Maya Kenig, which opens today at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema. In the film’s
first shot we see a close-up of Libby (Elya Inbar), an adolescent girl dragging
a suitcase and carefully carrying a potted plant across an air terminal, her
face a mix of uncertainty and determination. Kenig cuts to an overhead shot
that isolates the girl in the frame, surrounded by the unreadable space of the
terminal’s featureless floor. A couple of shots later, we hear, then see Shaul
(Gur Bentwich), her father, arguing rather playfully with a cab driver over
parking, a boyish figure in a wildly inappropriate Hawaiian shirt.
With striking economy, Kenig has conveyed to the
audience the family dynamic that will dominate her film, the strange imbalance
between the child mature beyond her 13 years and her feckless dreamer of a
father. And Kenig, who was born in 1979 has also announced herself as a
filmmaker with self-assurance belies her own relative youth.
It has frequently been observed that Israeli artists
have a higher-than-usual tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty, and a
refreshing tolerance for open endings. If Israel itself is a work-in-progress
and a comparative youngster among nations, her artists see the world as a
reflection of that state. “Off-White Lies” is a prime example, a film that
eschews easy characterizations and sidesteps potential melodrama for something
more complicated.
A father-and-child reunion, not quite looked for
Shaul is a luftmentsch, a dreamer who fancies himself
an inventor of potential importance. Virtually homeless, he needs to find a
place to settle his daughter when his ex-wife sends her to him from California.
It’s 2006 and the Lebanon War provides him with a convenient solution: he and
Libby will pose as refugees from the missile attacks in the north and settle in
as guests in someone’s home in Jerusalem. It seems all too easy when they are
paired off with a well-to-do family, Gideon (Tzahi Grad), Helit (Salit
Achi-Miriam) and their 18-year-old son Yuval (Arad Yeini). All they have to do
is keep the lies from becoming too outlandish and the truth from becoming too
apparent.
Kenig and co-writer Dana Dimant resist the temptations
of caricature and easy laughs. Bentwich plays Shaul as a charmer, certainly,
but he’s neither quite a foolish nor as facile as the character could have
been. The most convincing cross-reference would be Ronald Bronstein’s
astonishing performance as the father in “Daddy Long Legs,” a resilient wild
man with a knack for self-preservation, alternately funny and pathetic;
Bentwich brings the same survivor instinct to Shaul. Similarly, Tzahi Grad, so often a merely
menacing gargoyle who seems to have been parachuted into Israel from a ‘30s
Warner Brothers gangster film, is no less threatening here, but nuanced and
complicated in ways that render his motivations more mysterious and
provocative.
But the real keeper in this nicely tuned ensemble cast
is Elya Inbar. In her performance, Libby is that utterly believable hybrid of
girl-almost-woman, mercurial and unpredictable, equal parts American and
Israeli, self-assured and yet afraid, childish and precocious. Her scenes with
Arad Yeini are a marvel of mixed emotions as Libby tries prematurely to
negotiate the transition between adolescence and adulthood.
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