Distortion

I remember a certain Tuesday, the morning of 18/6/02 to be exact. I was dozed off, trying to convince myself to get out of bed when a horrific explosion was heard. I went to the kitchen where I have a view of several neighborhoods in the southern Jerusalem and saw a pillar of smoke rising from a distant point, the sight of the smoke was followed a minute later by the waling of sirens. I remember rushing to my bedroom, taking out my binoculars, racing back to the kitchen and spotting the image of a glass shattered bus. The bus was still near the pick up station where a terrorist boarded on it and with a single click on a TNT device, murdered 25 passengers, many of whom were on their way to school. The wife of a good friend of mine, sat on the bus at the back row, a seemingly arbitrary and meaningless decision that saved her life.

I'm sure that every Israeli has at least one terror-related memory he wishes he never would have had and it was only a matter of time before someone made a film about it. As it turned out, the movie was about to become a repressed memory of its own.

The film is about a play-write on a dry run, Haim Buzaglo (portrayed by, hmmm, Haim Buzaglo who also wrote and directed the film) that spends the better part of his day conducting staring contests with his blank word processor page. In the meantime, his girlfriend, a field reporter for the Israeli commercial channel, decides to make a piece about a debt ridden ex-army officer. Buzaglo, bored and a bit paranoid due what is medically known as the "what on earth this hot babe is dating me" syndrome, asks a private eye to conduct a stakeout on his girlfriend.

As the detective progresses in his investigation, his observations are permeating into the play and later on, to the lives of its actors. In the meantime, the play metamorphoses from a comic play into an indictment against the aloofness of the Israeli society. As for the movie, well, the movie becomes an exercise in frenzy editing, ensconced in its petty cardboard characters and unreliable dialogs while drifting miles away from the subject it was supposed to deal with in the first place.

When I say "cardboard characters" I refer to the characters that under the writer/director's obsession for a "meaningful" film, were devoid of any genuine dialogs and any shred of reliability. I won't elaborate too much about it. Suffice to say that I'm sure that homeless barefoot male prostitutes rarely go the theater. With the intention to see a play, that is.

This movie, according to Haim Buzaglo himself is the first part of a current agenda trilogy. I sincerely hope that the other two films will be derived from the experiences like the one I wrote about in the beginning of my review as opposed to the secluded world of characters that are anything but existent and a plot that is anything but compelling.

4 out of 10 in my FilmOmeter.

P.S. This movie was a landmark in austerity. It was shot in ten days, all the cast worked for free and the entire cost of the film was about 12,000$ (no, I didn't omit a zero or two, twelve thousand dollars). Makes you wonder why it took 34,000$ to complete Blair witch project.

Distortion is a disturbing, haunting film, about life imitating art and art reflecting life. Haim Bouzaglo, the director of the film, plays the role of Haim Bouzaglo, artistically blocked and sexually impotent playwright, who finds inspiration in his suspicions about the subject of his girl friend's documentary. As an Arab suicide bomber, disguised in skullcap and American t-shirt, wanders through the landscape in search of his target and his nerves, Haim transcribes his girl friend's life as she films her documentary and incorporates himself and his actors' lives during rehearsals. But the bomber has already struck and Haim has left the restaurant just minutes earlier. Despite the manipulation of time and space, the story is crystal clear, comprehensive and absorbing, a brilliant commentary on the "distortion" of everyday Israeli life, where the political is intertwined with the personal, where everyone lives "on the edge," and people never know whether they are playing leading roles in their own lives or are merely dispensable bit players in someone else's dramatic narrative.

Bouzaglo plays with this notion of everyone being an actor in someone else's production brilliantly. We are always voyeurs, seeing what the fictional director sees illicitly but also what the "real" director chooses to reveal. To remind us that these glimpses are violations of privacy, Bouzaglo takes us into the bathroom and the bedroom (sometimes the bedroom is the street and rooftop), and repeatedly frames his views within TV, video, or security screens. Actors play the role of actors who represent the "real" characters played by actors. Of course, each of the actors is the star of his or her own production, only dimly aware of their diminished roles in their fellow actor's personal films. The detective hired by the playwright becomes a character in the play. The actor hired to play the role of the detective seeks out the detective for "tips" on how to play the role, is caught by the detective on surveillance tapes, and they attend a cast party as their real selves.

Despite this multiplicity of views, there is no mistaking the clear lines of this narrative: the playwright searches for subject matter, the bomber seeks a target, and the detective stalks the filmmaker. Nor is there any difficulty locating Bouzaglo's ultimate target—enervated and impotent Israel, fully conscious of the threatening peril but incapable of meaningful action. Israel is Bouzaglo, the impotent fictional playwright cannibalizing his own life for his play. Israel is also the bankrupt soldier-entrepreneur who is the subject of the filmmaker's documentary, the cheating actors and actresses, and the cuckolded husband. They are all Israel because they are all helpless, caught in inaction or aimless action, as the bomber scans the landscape for his best target. All the characters can do as another bombing is reported is have sex and keep "score" of victims.

There is personal triumph, vindication, perhaps revenge at the end of this play within a story within a film, but viewers will be left aching for the state of Israel even as they are filled with admiration for Bouzaglo's memorable rendition of a nation's plight within the telling of an individual's story.

I have read with great interest the only available comment made before mine on this movie and I would first like to say that I understand the point of view of the previous user who commented on this movie very well: viewed from an Israeli perspective, I can very well imagine that this movie touches upon very sensitive issues and that the slightest detail can have a great importance for a viewer who is more or less directly concerned by the events depicted in this movie. What I would like to say is that 'Distortion' was shown at a film festival in Geneva in November 2005 (Festival 'Cinéma tout écran') where it won the award of the audience ('Prix du public'in French). For what affects me, I liked the 'nervous camera' work of Mr Bouzaglo, who, in my opinion, portrayed an atmosphere of extreme tension and uneasiness in the movie very well, and I think that most of the swiss viewers appreciated this in the movie. This perspective, however, might seem totally 'alien' to an Israeli viewer, but not so surprising when it comes to swiss viewers, because Switzerland is a country which has NEVER been subject to any terrorist attack. It therefore comes as no surprise that the audience in Geneva judged this film with a much more 'detached' perspective.I would also like to quote what Mr Bouzaglo said when he was interviewed by a Geneva newspaper (I'm translating from French): ''After 50 years of living here and after undergoing all this violence, we may ask ourselves if it is still possible to remain normal.We might sometimes think that it would be easier to commit suicide than to go on living. We are like the characters in my movie,''on the edge of the edge''. This is the reason why the private detective, who is somehow ''voyeur'' is the happiest character in the movie, because he earns a living thanks to the system, he takes advantage of this situation'' This is, in substance, the main thing that I and the swiss public, in my opinion, pointed out in this movie, and that we did not pay attention to some inconsistencies regarding the characters in the movie which the precedent reviewer pointed out with great accuracy and humor. So, to sum up, different country=different perspective, but I think that this is somehow great, because it reassures me for what affects the future of cinema, that is to say that it well never be subject to a 'unique' of 'formatted' way of thinking.

Distortion is a movie that sort of caught me by surprise.. A sort of multi layered drama that focuses on a man writing a play about his life experiences that are happening to him right at this moment. To be more concise, he feels that his wife is cheating on him, so he hires a private eye to snoop on him. His wife has no idea that this is happening. Meanwhile, the actors in this play are also having a few whoopdedoodles up their sleeves by fooling around with each other and with, shall we say, unscrupulous people in the world of Israel. The whole thing culminates in a theater with all the actors present and the predictable (but not really) happens.

The director of the piece really keeps things moving along with the ensemble cast of characters, and edits in a way that makes you pay attention, This is a fun film actually, one which I didn't mind viewing and would recommend people check out.