35 Downhill

Old man Pavel is dead hanging from a tree in an Israeli kibbutz. His old friend Albert gets angry at a young man joking about him. Albert claims that he and Pavel had driven a tractor all the way to Eilat in a week during the Yom Kippur War. He makes a bet to repeat the feat despite being sick with diabetes and worst. His sad-sack son Ben joins him. Ben wants him to sign papers to get restitution from Poland for a family factory property.

Israel is one angry country. That's interesting. I don't like Ben. His bitter pathetic nature is really tiresome. He's also a complete idiot. It starts with the signing. If he has any brains, he would use his father's combativeness to get it signed. Tell him that it's a way to get back at the Poles or the Nazis. Don't whine about needing the money for an apartment. Ben whines way too much for me to care about him. He does come out of his self-pity to battle his father once in awhile and I almost like those parts. The movie wants the audience to love Albert, but that's not always the case either. This father-son relationship needs some real work. There are some interesting self-improvement towards the end. If Ben is less Ben, I may like this more.

It's a shock that after David Lynch's "The Straight Story," anyone would make another movie about an old man taking a long journey by tractor. But there's no law against it. This movie, although filmed in Israel with Israeli actors, is a French co-production, and it's one of the Frenchest Israeli movies that I've seen. If it feels like stopping for a monologue by an intriguing stranger, it'll stop for a monologue by an intriguing stranger.

In the French New Wave tradition, the filmmaker's effort pays off at the level of the scene, not in the overall plot or character development. And the characters are constantly failing to find a connection with one another and even with any purpose greater than themselves. The man on the tractor is ostensibly fine with that; he's an "I did it my way" kind of guy. He just wishes he could be prouder of his son.

As the road trip progresses, often there's not a very strong sense of where we are and how far we've travelled. The man doesn't set out on the tractor alone, his son sets out with him, so by Hollywood standards we could expect that the trip will turn out to be a metaphor for a journey into mutual understanding, but if it is, it's not a very smoothly executed journey in that sense.

There's a lot of melancholy in the movie, maybe more than the public will like, but the industry gave it eight best-of-year nominations in important categories, with one win-- Best Supporting Actor, for the tractor man's role (which could very well have been considered a lead).