She's Coming Home (2013)

A cheeky pun lies at the core of this challenging Israeli sex drama. The heroine is a documentary filmmaker retreating to her parents’ suburban flat after the end of an affair. She is supposedly writing a script but instead tries out aggressive female roles in an unsympathetic reality. 

In the opening scene collision 33-year-old Michal is rear-ended by an older man, Zeev. That dynamic repeats in their first sex act, her rear penetration. In a third form of back-sliding, psychological regression, the woman reverts to teenage angst in her parents’ cramped home, both in her impulsive behaviour and in her revolt against their authority. 

Their tension over the father’s extra car is pure Teen. The woman sees it as representing her long overdue independence. The father sells his car to an acquaintance rather than help free his daughter. For her part, the mother puts salt in the sugar bowl.  

Ostensibly to research the school scene, Michal sidetracks her screenwriting to enter Zeev’s world. She gets stoned with a high school student for a one-night stand. She attends their grad prom, where she has another violent sexual encounter with Zeev.

This lover personifies the violent patriarchy. As well as being the school principal, he is a Lieutenant Colonel in the army reserve. Both his sexual encounters with Michal end in violence, the first in Zeev’s penetration and the second in his rejection of her advances in the school’s girls’ washroom. For all the freedom Michal's generation enjoys, a patriarchal check persists.

Zeev may seem sensitive in singing his prom ballad, but he is still driven by a masculine authoritarianism. Michal’s father parallels this troubling patriarchy, both when he sees her naked in the bathroom and when he -- like Zeev -- slaps her in a later argument. Similarly, Michal’s mother’s opposition to Michal’s affair seems impelled by her own attraction to Zeev, which she lacks the courage to advance.

Clearly writer/director Maya Dreifuss is an auteur to be reckoned with. In Bikur Holim (2005) heroine Michal (again) suspends her trip to India to broker the troubled relationship between her mother and grandmother, three generations of women in an oppressive tangle. In Highway 65 Daphna is a spirited 40-year-old policewoman working petty crimes in Tel Aviv. Her growing uncertainty in distinguishing reality from fantasy anticipates our Michal’s role-playing, both as a troubled neo-teen and in the hooker act she performs for Zeev. Dreifuss was also one of the five women directors in Heroine (2016), which presented five stories of women struggling in their defining professions: officer, babysitter, nurse, stripper, director. Her present film seems to grow out of the last.

Dreifuss’s film also shares philosophic territory with Hagar Ban Asher’s The Slut (see my analysis on this site). Both explore the societal and biologic limits that oppress women even in modern Israel, which -- apart from the Orthodox extremity -- is the most egalitarian state in the region and among the world’s most open to women’s rights and advancement. By their biological role in reproduction and their societal function in sex their very freedoms only lead back into their restriction.