Until a recent surge in Israeli cinema, with promising debut features by Nir Bergman (Broken Wings) and Dover Koshashvili (Late Marriage), prolific director Amos Gitai (Kadosh, Kippur) seemed like the country's one-man band, or at least its only prominent name in international circles. Though he's hampered by a lugubrious sense of pacing and style, Gitai's engagement in the culture has never been in question, as evidenced by a filmography that touches provocatively on Israeli history, politics, and religion. But Gitai pushes all these concerns to the background in the refreshingly slight Alila, an ensemble drama that's content merely to detail the everyday lives of apartment dwellers in Tel Aviv without overreaching for larger significance.
In the eccentric opening sequence, Gitai announces his playful intentions by reading the names of the cast and crewmembers as they appear onscreen, then encouraging the audience to "enjoy the film." Enjoyment isn't exactly what Alila offers, since the interlocking storylines all deal in some way with loneliness and regret, but there's some pleasure to be found in Gitai's polished craft and ruefully funny insights into his ensemble of flawed singles. Working from Yehoshua Kenaz's well-regarded novel Returning Lost Loves, Gitai can only scratch the surface of the dozen or so characters who are presumably more fleshed out on the page, but more crucially, he brings them together into a vivid, dysfunctional community.
Though news reports of terrorist strikes and retaliations bleed through their radios, the residents of a once-peaceful Tel Aviv apartment building are grappling with more immediate calamities. Its oldest tenant, a feisty Holocaust survivor (Yosef Carmon) who enjoys the quiet company of his Filipino maid (Lyn Shiao Zamir), is assaulted by noise, from the construction crew of illegal Chinese immigrants jerry-rigging an extension outside to the cries of ecstasy emanating from an adjacent unit, where Yaël Abecassis carries on a self-destructive affair with a married brute. Meanwhile, Abecassis' newly divorced friend Hana Laszlo tries to enjoy a fling with a younger man, but her sad-sack husband Uri Klauzner keeps interrupting, especially when their sullen son (Amit Mestechkin) goes AWOL from the army.
Appropriately enough for an Israeli filmmaker, Gitai consistently views the world as fractured or broken, tenuously constructed along tectonic plates that could shift at any moment. But not since Kadosh, his moving treatment of religious dogma, has he expressed this idea on such an intimate scale. The characters in Alila aren't as thoroughly sketched out, but the film works nicely as a microcosm of Tel Aviv, with the apartment harnessing all the tension that seethes through the city. Their messy, unresolved lives have a cumulative impact that's deeply unsettling.