I caught this on Amazon Prime one day before its offering was to expire. While today Israel has a budding film industry with some top-notch offerings and concepts that the entire world licenses to remake, I was curious to see what the standards for its industry were back in the 1980s. If "Goodbye, New York" is any indication, it was shlock.
The story is idiotic; the acting is worse. At one point, I wondered whether a after-school special's dialogue from that time period would have been better (it may have been). Later, it occurred to me that the dialogue sounded as leaden and as robotic as say, an 80s porn film. And then, in the film - no joke! - one of the characters claimed to have been a porn actress from the States! Honest to God, the development of the characters, the acting, the storyline was about as developed as it would have been in any 80s-era erotic offering, which is to say, not much.
Some reviewers here criticize this movie as pro-Israeli propaganda. I disagree. Every character is reduced to a stereotype. While the two Arabs (store-owner, Beduoin) were one-note, so were the idiotic Israeli men. So was Julie Hagerty, the American. So was her husband. So were the people on the Kibbutz. So was the story. So was the Romanian character who was trying to "cheat" on a business transaction. So was the boyfriend of Julie Hagerty's girlfriend from the kibbutz. So was Albert, her quick-lived fall-in-love romantic affair. So was the adult-film actress in the bar. Every character in this film was one-tone, stupid, and uninteresting. The only redeemable character was the lead actor (also director and writer), Amos Kollek, who started off the movie, as a womanizer as well.
Terrible movie.
The one interesting aspect of the film was to observe how much Israel has modernized over the past 35 years. I visited in 2008, and by then, Israel was a country of modern highways, tech companies, and skyscrapers. In 1984, when this movie came out, Tel Aviv was Israel's most modern city and from the shots from this film, it looks 80s-worn and weathered . . . nothing like today. Most of the shots - including those in Jerusalem - look rustic and rural, which is how Israel was. This is before the mass-immigration from the former Soviet Union that caused great growing pains to this tiny country. This was also before the first and the second Intifadas (December 1987; October 2000). This was before the bus bombings and the suicide bombings in the streets and corridors of Main Street and the shopping malls. This is before the Peace Initiatives and before the Palestinian Authority. It was a different world back then. This movie's value lies in its time encapsulation, which occurred through no intention of its own. It's like seeing an old James Bond film from the 60s or 70s from Italy or Thailand or New Orleans and observing how those same areas have changed in the past forty or fifty years.
It's a time capsule of Israel from the 80s with the quality of an adult film from that same era. Other than the comparing and contrasting the modernization and development of Israel in the past 35 years, an adult film is probably more interesting.
