Friday, September 6, 2019

Flawless

The Israeli screenwriting and directing team of Tal Granit and her male partner Sharon Maymon have a clear line in compassion. In their The Farewell Party (2014) residents in a seniors home develop a self-euthanasia machine to enable the dignified shaking off of their mortal coil. The sombre plot flew on humour and good nature. 
Flawless (the title accurately describes it) opens like an Israeli Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Clever high school girls snap and crackle at each other. They obsess over their body image and looming Prom Night which, by the way, calls for much more theatrical date-making than we’ve experienced. Riding a white horse into gym? (I just phoned Dena one night, daring to piss off my besotted pal Elliot. Full disclosure: they wed, live happily ever after and Elliot says he forgives.) The melodramatic dating ploys balance off the central characters’ heightened anxieties. 
Our first pleasure is this glimpse into Israel’s version of the North-American teen subculture. Self-consciousness unites us all. As do pecking orders. We quickly attach to the flat Mika and the nose-conscious Keshet, until the willowy blonde Eden wafts by, a stunning enigma.
Eden takes over the atmosphere. Far from her paradisal name, she is a woman born in a man’s body, compelled to conceal her nature and apparently barred from intimacy. She’s played superbly by the Israeli tran actress/model Strav Strashko. 
Eden’s father supports her as best he can. But he can’t bring himself to give her any irreversible treatment, such as a breast implant, lest her identity prove “just a phase.” For that she follows her two new friends’ compulsion. The three sneak off to the Ukraine where they would each provide a kidney transplant to get their respective nose and boob jobs. 
Keshet’s post-op collapse exposes their project.  They become centers of disdainful attention, especially the exposed Eden. Nor do their new bodies avail them. Mika’s boyfriend dumps her. She and Keshet both turn against Eden when they learn her secret, angry she (in their view) lied. So does Itay, the class scapegoat, still bitter that she declined his prom date. 
Eventually Eden gets her human due. Her father realizes his late wife’s prediction: “It’s a phase — but you’ll get over it.” Even Itay relents. With a new courage he saves her from a physical attack by the boys who have been brutalizing him. Ripping off their ski-masks the victims can now identify their assailants — but discreetly decline to prosecute. The title points to the heroine’s nature independent of her physical incongruity.
  With two close girlfriends and her Itay Eden is at last at peace wth herself and her social circle. She declines her father’s offer to move yet again to escape her unjust shaming.
  Unlike most Israeli films that cross the pond, this one would seem to be free of the nation’s political concerns. And yet…. It’s troubling to see their high-schoolers as cruel to each other and as bigoted as our gland-cases are. But no other nation in the region would dare make a film with this compassion and this embrace of the gender spectrum.  

 

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