Danny Lerner's "Frozen Days" (Yamim Kfuim), which is now playing in wide release in Israel, had its premiere about a year ago in the competition of the Haifa Film Festival, where it won the best film award. I praised the film at the time, but in the months that have gone by since then I asked myself whether my esteem for the work did not stem from two indirect factors: the fact that the film's competitors at last year's festival were especially weak, and the feeling of discovery that accompanied the viewing of the film. Until the Haifa festival I had never heard of Lerner - a graduate of the Film and Television Department at Tel Aviv University - or of the film, which started out as a student project and was produced on a shoestring budget.

The feeling was that "Frozen Days" came out of nowhere and succeeded, and the surprise was even more pleasant because in its character and style, it is very different from most films that are made in Israel. However, is that enough? Quite a few "different" films have already been made in Israel, and many of them have joined the list of curiosities of the local film industry.

As a result, I was a bit apprehensive before I went to see "Frozen Days" again, ahead of its commercial release. Happily, I found that I had been right the first time. On second viewing, the film seems even more intelligent and whole than I thought after the first viewing. Of the Israeli films I have seen this year, "Frozen Days" is, in my opinion, the most interesting.

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Feeling at home

Probably the most impressive thing about the film is Lerner's absolute control of the elements of plot, conception and style. He seems to be a director who knows exactly what he is doing. The materials he works with are not easy. True, "Frozen Days" is set in an existing Israeli reality, but it departs radically from the dominant tendency here to create a realistic cinema, with a special fondness for family melodramas that incorporate comic touches. It is a pleasure to see a film that is not like this, a film with a style of its own, which refers to other cinematic traditions in a knowing manner.

The heroine of Lerner's film is a young drug dealer known only as "Meow." She likes to enter empty apartments that are up for sale and live in them for a time. This aspect of the plot recalls the film "3 Iron," by Korean director Kim-ki Duk, which also makes use of the idea of breaking into homes whose owners are away as a metaphor for urban dislocation. It's interesting to see how filmmakers who are working in such different places express their feelings in a similar form.

Meow spends her spare time at an Internet cafe and has a chat buddy who calls himself "Zero." After much importuning, and after revealing his real name, Alex Kaplan, he persuades Meow to meet him, first in his apartment - where she is unable to see him because of a power failure - and afterward in a nightclub. However, the meeting never takes place. Alex is seriously wounded in a terrorist attack in the club just before the meeting and is taken, unconscious, to a Tel Aviv hospital. Meow moves into his place and gradually assumes his identity.

Fragmented womanhood

Many influences are apparent in Lerner's film: Roman Polanski (especially "Repulsion," "Rosemary's Baby" and "The Tenant"); Dario Argento, the Italian maker of horror films; the low-budget horror films that were produced in the United States in the 1960s. And there is even Hitchcock - something in the film's style of cinematography, which is mostly in black and white, recalls "Psycho," a film that has influenced most American horror films since the 1960s. It is also unlikely that the surname Kaplan was chosen by chance (George Kaplan is the name of the fictitious character that Cary Grant adopts in "North by Northwest"). But this abundance of influences, which might have come across as mere copycatting by an educated and diligent student, does not weigh on the film; on the contrary, it infuses the film in a richly complex way. This too is a reason for holding the film in high regard. The result is a black horror comedy, which succeeds in functioning both within its tradition and separate from it.

Lerner places on the screen a portrait of womanhood in an ongoing state of fragmentation and collapse (a preoccupation with schizophrenia, split personality and feminine insanity characterizes many horror films). The portrait, though, is also drawn in such a way that despite its stylistic distance from the Israeli reality, the film touches that reality more directly and more immediately than most local films, which seek to achieve this goal through more realistic means.

At one level, "Frozen Days" deals with the way in which a terrorist attack causes a total undermining of the concept of reality itself. Gradually, and very precisely, it succeeds in projecting the sense of existential horror that characterizes life in this place. The fact that it does so not with excessive solemnity, but with a good deal of humor and irony, far from tempering the horror, actually heightens it. It is so familiar that the effect of stylistic alienation that Lerner adopts appears to be the most appropriate representation of the reality in which we live.

Good start

A first film is a highly charged concept in the history of the cinema. "Frozen Days" seems to be an apt first film. It attests to original cinematic thought, and as such, it can be a good point of departure for filmmaking which, it is to be hoped, will become richer and develop in many different directions.

This is a work of no little daring, both in its form and its storyline. Although it is a first film, there is nothing amateur about it. The screenplay progresses and develops, shifts in time and repeats itself consistently and very impressively, and the choice of black-and-white, apart from one sequence in color, also shows judicious and mature cinematic thought. High praise is due to the cinematographer, Ram Shweky, and to Tomer Ran, who, undoubtedly at Lerner's behest, provides "Frozen Days" with music that serves the film wittily and does not merely ornament it.

The performance of Anat Klausner in the lead role is yet another of the film's achievements. Klausner, whose name I was not familiar with before, carries the entire film on her shoulders. There is no scene in which she does not appear, and in a delicate and precise way she is able to convey a range of emotions so rich that they turn her character into an almost abstract being, yet without the loss of her concrete distinctness. This year we have seen several fine performances by actresses in Israeli films, such as Bar Belfer in "Someone to Run With" and Assi Levy and Rotem Abuhav in "Aviva, My Love." Klausner's performance in "Frozen Days" is, in my opinion, the most impressive of them all.