Saturday 6 September 2014

Ha-Mashgihim (Meni Yaesh, 2012)

In God's Neighbours, a young Jewish fundamentalist and his comrades violently enforce the Sabbath laws in their community, in between having skirmishes with Arabs. His single-minded life gets complicated when he falls in love with a girl who doesn't fit his extremist position. It's therefore a classic trajectory, in which the path to self-awareness and moderation has the usual pitfalls and way stations, but the characters are drawn with both care and a cool distance, and the artless principal performances in a courtship that is almost archaic in its sense of restraint make their story an involving one.

6/10

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