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A waste of 90 minutes of my life

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

"Shelter" is a new Israeli short-story based movie from 2017 written and directed by Eran Riklis. The case has some names that will sound familiar to film fans, but apart from the performance by Neta Riskin most of the time, this movie was a major disappointment. It may have had partially to do with me watching the German dub version and this was realy not done well, but there were other more objective component too that I found downright awful. One would be the editing, which seemed wquite a mess. The jumps between different times, different countries, different rooms etc. felt all extremely shoody to me. The acting like I wrote was not the worst about this movie, but not too great either. There are definite moments of overacting, but this also has to do with the dialogues itself and I am not even sure if you can blame any of the actors here, especially the two actresses at the center of it all. The film had problems from the beginning. I think the ways in which the audiences was thrown inside the story so quickly, with hardly any elaboration on the main characters, any presentation of the situation just felt wrong for so many reasons. The inclusion of attracted neighbors, old ladies and a fire felt all for the sake of it and did not add any dramatic relevance at all for me. It felt as if Riklis used all the known formulas that worked in so many other films, but gave it all the wrong approaches and the final execution is on a level where I just wish i could unsee this film. The best example is also the dream sequence. It may not have been entirely predictable that it is not real, but it just felt shoddy, again maybe because of the editing. When we see the two with heaby make-up ready to party, it doesn't fit in. When the main character opens the door to anybody despite acting so seriously about letting absolutely nobody in, it basically mocks the entire movie and all characters at the center of it. And don't even get me started about the lesbian kiss scene. If we cannot convince anybody with the plot and (complete lack of sufficient) attention to detail, lets get at least some men in the audience horny. The pretty stunning main character here may be nice to look at, but well it's a movie, not a photo shoot. When finally I thought that there was some solid decision, some bravery from the makers to kill off one of the two, they revoked it eventually and made things even worse. The background story with the dead man and the attempts at pregnancy never makes an emotional impact either. Same for the shootout at the end that would have been an insult to almost every lifetime movie. And very creative the inclusion of the name "Avner" too. I say definitely skip this film and watch Spielberg's Munich instead.

The film opens with a quotation from Kahlil Gibran. "Life is an island, rocks are its desires, trees its dreams, and flowers its loneliness, and it is in the middle of an ocean of solitude and seclusion." I'm not sure whether that's the exact translation used in the movie. Anyway, the movie shows us two women secluded in a lonely apartment for a good cinematic reason-- one is an agent assigned to keep the other one safe from the bad guys-- while each of them is intent on not only on surviving but on the goal of pursuing a purposeful parental relationship-- nurturing an island of life-- in the face of the ocean of nihilism symbolized by the betrayals and assassinations accompanying international espionage and terrorism. Writer/director Eran Riklis compares the film to Bergman's Persona because of the intimacy and tension of the relationship between the two women, but I think a closer comparison might be with Coppola's The Rain People, where a woman unsure of herself as a future mother picks up a hitchhiker and finds herself receiving practice in the task of caring for another person.When the movie ended, a woman in the theater asked me to take one side or the other in a debate with her friend over what actually had happened during the final minutes. The audience is indeed left with some bits to figure out, but I didn't feel seriously cheated. The production was professional, suspense was maintained continuously, and the music-- even if composer Yehonatan Riklis is, one might guess, some kind of relative of the director-- makes a fine, tasteful, enhancement.

The first film that I viewed in 2018 in a pre-screening before the Israeli premiere was Shelter (original title 'Mistor'). It is directed by Eran Riklis, a director whose previous works The Syrian Bride and The Human Resources Manager I liked. Those were movies inspired by the Israeli reality, complex and emotional at the same time. The latest was based on a novel by A.B. Yeoshua. With Shelter Riklis tries a very different type of movie, a combination of psychological thriller and action movie, and the result was for me quite disappointing.Yet, I can understand what intended Riklis with this story (he also wrote the script). The encounter between the Israeli Mossad agent and the Lebanese collaborator that she has the mission to defend while recovering from a plastic surgery that aims to change her physiognomy creates the premises of the meeting of two women who are separated by almost everything in their personal biographies and yet have so much to share as personal traumas. Women fighting in the secret wars have no easy time, and there is very little literature or film that dealt with these topic if at all. There is no feminine version of John Le Carre and of his heroes if you want.While the intentions and premises are interesting, the execution lacks pace and the building of the relationship that is supposed to take place in the sheltering apartment in Germany is never credible on screen. I am not sure who is to blame for this, maybe more time should have been spent in the claustrophobic enclosure of the house and the inserts describing the menace closing on the two women could have been less or ignored at all. The two actresses (Neta Riskin and especially Golshifteh Farahani) do a reasonable job, but the chemistry that would have made their relationship credible is missing. The final quarter of the film switches pace and turns the whole story into an action movie, but lacks credibility. Psychological thrillers and action spy movies are two very different genres and their mixing does not work.