New Film by Lior Ashkenazi

Lior Ashkenazi is well-known as one of the most outstanding actors in the Israeli film world.  He has starred in numerous excellent Israeli films, including Late Marriage, Walk on Water, Norman, Footnote, Foxtrot.  With his directing debut, Perfect Strangers, we see his talent also as a director!  This film is both humorous and serious, it is fast-paced, strongly directed and edited, and superbly acted. 

The film is based on the Italian award-winning film of the same title directed by Paolo Genovese (2016), which seats a bunch of couples around a table, and one suggests putting their cellphones in the middle.  Thus, all the participants end up sharing their messages and phone calls that come in during the evening.  Certainly, a recipe for disaster! Would you share all the details of your life with your friends?

Lior Ashkenazi’s local cultural version of the film is full of twists and turns.  It offers us insights into seven friends, all of them around a dinner table, and makes the outcome into a uniquely Israeli story, with secrets big and small.  The film takes place in a comfortable suburb, where upper middle-class friends joke about how terrible it would be to live in Tel Aviv.  They have a real suburban lifestyle and the host of the evening is very proud of his new gas grill on his beautiful balcony, on which he cooks all kinds of ostentatious meat dishes, reflecting his over-the-top cultural milieu.   

The conversation begins as lightweight and humorous, and at first, I thought the film was a great comedy, but we soon discover it has a dark side to it as well. Slowly there arises a real competition among the participants and many personal problems are brought up, including lying about how one’s business is doing, and sharing problems with regard to child-rearing. After the cellphones are placed in the middle of the table, the tone of the banter begins to shift from light to heavy, as some sensational secrets emerge. 

We all live behind a curtain of a certain amount of fiction. I will not reveal any spoilers about some of the secrets that are revealed that lead to more and more complications among the friends at the table. Nor will I share anything about the remarkable denouement, which gives the plot a whole new paradoxical meaning. Suffice it to say that the film is full of surprises.

I really enjoyed this film.  The script was tight and complex – it deals with many issues in Israeli society, including problems of post-trauma from experiences in the army and the nuanced nature of Israel society’s struggles relating to people in the LGBTQ community. It is labelled as both a comedy and a drama, and I now understand why. Freud would have loved this film as well!

Take a look at the trailer (Hebrew only).