Danny Lerner's sophomore slump

In one of the most beautiful scenes viewed recently on the Israeli film screen, the two stars of Danny Lerner's film "Walls" ("Kirot") are standing on the roof of a house in South Tel Aviv on a stormy winter night. One of them teaches the other how to use a pistol, as she coordinates the sounds of shooting with the sounds of the thunder in the gloomy skies of Tel Aviv.

The scene is not only lovely, it is also clever, and it perfectly fulfills the objectives that Lerner has set for himself. It's a shame that the film as a whole does not follow suit.

One of the biggest surprises in the history of Israeli cinema in recent years took place at the 2005 film festival in Haifa, when at the end of a tiresome competition of Israeli feature films, they screened an unknown film directed by a young artist, a graduate of the film and television department at Tel Aviv University.

The film was "Frozen Days" ("Yamim Kfuim"), Danny Lerner's first full-length feature, and while it strayed from most of the films produced in Israel, it still remained attached to reality here.

When the film was shown in Israeli movie theaters, I wrote that its most impressive aspect, especially for a first film, is Lerner's total control of the materials of which his film was composed, in terms of plot, ideas and styles. After watching his second film, I still hold by this statement and I don't believe that Lerner is any less wise and talented a director than I had first believed.

"Walls," which was produced four years after "Frozen Days," also attests to Lerner's ability, and I still believe he is one of the most interesting young artists now working in local cinema. However, there is a smaller degree of overall control than in his previous film. Some will say that this is a sophomore slump, wherein the director feels the need to meet the expectations aroused by his first film, but the problems of "Walls" are more substantial, and stem from the similarity as well as the difference between the present film and its predecessor.

In "Walls," as in his first film, Lerner wants to plant genre materials into the Israeli reality. In "Frozen Days," whose plot centers around a terror attack that takes place in Tel Aviv, Lerner used materials taken from the tradition of horror films; in "Walls" he turns to action. Women are placed at the center of both plots.

The problems in "Walls" begin with the difference between the female characters that Lerner uses in his new film and the female character who was at the center of his first one.

"Frozen Days" presented the story of a young Tel Aviv drug dealer, known only by her nickname "Meow," who has a habit of squatting in apartments that are up for sale. By means of the character and the story of the girl, who is a witness to a terror attack in a Tel Aviv nightclub, "Frozen Days" dealt with female schizophrenia, a subject that has appeared in many horror films.

But the film avoided being a private test case of one woman with problems. Like the best horror films that have dealt with this subject, for example Roman Polanski's "Repulsion," whose influence was apparent in the film, "Frozen Days" succeeded in using the attack as a starting point for dealing with her. This runs against other Israeli films from that period, which would use a terror attack first and foremost as a melodramatic plot element.

Lerner, however, succeeded in expressing the urban and existential terror that is part of an incident of this type wisely and fairly. "Frozen Days" was both concrete and abstract at the same time, and the combination and balance between them worked in a very surprising and impressive way.

In "Walls" the balance is far less perfect. The film's problems begin with Lerner's decision to turn the two heroines of the film into representations of problems women face that are far more concrete than those the heroine of "Frozen Days" deals with.

Galia (Olga Kurylenko), the star of "Walls," is an illegal resident in Israel who was brought here from Ukraine by local criminals after deserting her husband and daughter in her homeland. Playing against her is battered Elinor (Ninet Tayeb), Galia's neighbor in the apartment building in South Tel Aviv.

The plot of the film describes the attempts by the two women, who gradually join forces, to rebel against the social order that has turned both of them into the victims of violent patriarchal domination.

Lerner tries to create a constant parallel between the two women. He does so in a concrete way, by emphasizing the similarity between the their distressing situations, as well as more abstractly, through his choice of two actresses whose physical similarity is obvious.

However, the concrete aspect undermines the abstract one. While in "Frozen Days" the main stragem of the film (the two main characters in the film, a woman and a man, are actually one person) worked well, Lerner's choice this time of two characters, each of whom represents a different social problem, undermines his attempt to present the two as separate parts of one person.

The preoccupation with social problems - trafficking in women, family violence - also gives his film a didactic dimension, which is totally absent from his first film.

A similar problem also characterizes the style of the film. Whereas in "Frozen Days" Lerner succeeded in creating a tightly knit and focused film, which skillfully ranged between reality and hallucination and between the actual and the imaginary, and all of whose parts combined in a highly admirable way, his style in "Walls" goes in different directions. The main feeling aroused by the film is that Lerner did not see any of the directions of the film to the end, and remained stuck somewhere in the middle.

There are impressive moments and scenes in the film, which once again attest to Lerner's skill. There is impressive camera work and use of color (compliments also to cinematographer Ram Shweky, who also filmed "Frozen Days," which except for one scene in black and white); but there are also scenes that are not properly exploited, for example the climactic scene of the film, which takes place inside and next to the central bus station in Tel Aviv.

This is an excellent choice of location, but Lerner exploits it far less well than could be expected. And in general, the climax of the film suffers from a degree of confusion and even negligence that undermines the film's power to leave the dramatic and emotional impression that it is trying to achieve.

Watching "Walls" raises questions about the logic and credibility of the story and the events that take place in it. Even Lerner's attempt to involve the viewers in the situation described in the film and at the same time to keep at a distance, by using humor and other things, is not balanced. It is too easy to discern how and when Lerner is trying to do that, so that sometimes it seems too rational and even mechanical.

That same over-rationality also characterizes Lerner's use of his cinematic sources and the cinematic references in the film. This is a dangerous tendency because it is liable to lead to imitation and tedium. At the time, I complimented "Frozen Days" because it succeeded in avoiding this pitfall.

In addition to Polanski, also evident in the film were the influences of Dario Argento and even Alfred Hitchcock.

In his first film Lerner succeeded in using these influences in a unique manner and in planting them into the story and into the context of the film, in a skilled and rational way. In "Walls", where there are allusions to action films centered around women, such as "La Femme Nikita" by Luc Besson or "Kill Bill" by Quentin Tarantino, with stylistic influences ranging from Jean Luc Goddard to Brian de Palma, it does not work as well.

Both of the stars of the film, Olga Kurylenko and Ninet Tayeb, perform their parts skillfully, but their performance lacks the complexity and the emotional power of Anat Klausner, the star of "Frozen Days." The blame does not lie with the talent of the two actresses, but with the shaping of the two main characters in the film.

Just as "Frozen Days" aroused curiosity and anticipation regarding Danny Lerner's next film, "Walls" arouses curiosity and anticipation regarding his third one. In spite of the defects mentioned, and more I haven't brought up, such as superfluous scenes, "Walls" cannot be described as a disappointment. Rather, it is a film that indicates problems that may be a necessary part of Lerner's development as an artist. At least we can hope so.