Israeli director Shira Geffen interweaves the alienation of two women, a famous Israeli avant-garde artist and a beleaguered Palestinian labourer. Both move through life detached, stymied by the world around them.
She initially connects them with a missing screw. Indeed. the Israeli title means "screw loose." Artist Michal loses one while trying to put together a new Ikea-style bed. (The company name Itaka suggests 'ethics'). After her raging complaint, Nadine is unjustly fired for apparently having failed to bag the correct number of screws. She drops screws on her path to help her find her way home. That’s her prosaic version of Michal’s exploratory installation, performance and video art.
When the women cross paths— at a checkpoint, of course, where their cultures collide — they assume each other’s lives. Complicating that variation on the Prince and the Pauper story, the women look nothing like each other. Yet everyone accepts them in their new role.
From that we can infer the general insensitivity to women’s character, needs, desires, the failure either to sense or to accept individuation. Palestinian, Israeli — for women bearing the next generation of enemies the distinctions are irrelevant. So, too, Michal’s husband — away on a tech conference — looks like the neighbour Nadine is having a furtive affair with. The Israeli soldier’s lover in the last scene could pass for Arab. Alternatively, the individuating traits we see are irrelevant to the issues of humanity in that conflicted climate.
In one key shot the women meet on opposing escalators in the furniture store. But the shot has them moving sideways, laterally, as if to deny the characters’ vertical stratification. Neither rises, descends, or moves to progress. In the opening scene Michal lies in silence across the screen before falling out of bed, bruising her head. Her horizontality confirms her passivity, whether earlier as a very successful but politically ineffectual artist, or now in her amnesia.
Perhaps the film’s key metaphor is the musical chef’s note that crabs wear their skeletons on the outside. That’s why he plays violin music to soften them for Michal’s romantic anniversary dinner (that her husband will miss). When the violinist has an organism from his own music he points to the onanistic nature of Michal's abstruse art. Michal’s exhibition is titled “Rolling the Insides Out.” Her new Biennale piece features the womb she has had removed, an artistic realization of her resolve not to have children. "I don't want children" she screams on the phone to the furniture store manager, "I want a bed."
In contrast to the self-revealing Michal, Nadine lives a simpler, more prosaic manner. But her taciturn solidity and sexual initiative suggests she has a more solid character. She nurtures a private inner life that sustains her through her personal and job issues.
Suggesting a marriage tension, Michal's husband has an additional problem, which is related to the society's reduction of women. His computer has been overrun with graphic pornography. The techie hired to purge it advises Michal to warn her husband against inviting it. In one compelling shot, Michal can't give her father a screen kiss because his face has been reduced to a small square on the porn woman's vagina. That is a perverse parody of birthing.
The heroines' exchange of roles is heavily symbolic. Initially Michal has literally forgotten who she is. Nadine continues Michal’s catatonic remove from her interview with a German TV crew. When the German cameraman provokes her violence he exposes his own, gloating that the supposed Israeli peacenik is violent herself. His self-projecting allegation of violence is directed against the Israeli but could also apply to the Palestinian. Nadine’s pregnancy turns functional the profusion of nursery furniture the store has dumped on Michal.
Completing the switch, Michal is equipped with the suicidal bomb assigned Nadine. We don’t know whether she will achieve that end or not. The fatal mission is at least delayed when Nadine’s neighbour’s younger son pauses to buy roses — for his mother. On the stone wall Michal passes her painting of large yellow flowers, the hopeful emblem of art reviving a hardened obstructive nature. Small flowers adorn both women's dresses as they cross their lateral paths in the store.
The English title is pointedly ambiguous. The store deals in furniture their customers will put together — make — themselves. But as both women try to find coherence in their fragmented, numbing lives, they are fumblingly trying to find their own integrity, wholeness, being. They are as boxed a bunch of pieces as the eruption of Itaka cartons brings.
This region's political drama is usually played out in films by the men. Warriors play their war. Ms Geffen instead opts for a richly, ambiguously poetic vision that disables precise literalism. It is as moving as it is evocative.
There are a couple of personal notes. The director's actor husband plays the delivery man who asks if Michal needs help putting the furniture together -- then leaves before she can reply. Later the young soldier's leave cancellation means she must miss a concert by the director's singer brother. Geffen's art assumes a public platform and subject more committed than Michal's art scene, which is sharply satirized.
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