Resisei Ahava

Like Truffaut's "Story of Adele H," this is a portrait of a woman who attains a kind of spiritual nobility through the intensity of her love for a man although the man happens to be worthless. To dismiss her situation with a single word, as the English title "Obsession" does, is to make the film seem unnecessary-- not that the Hebrew title, which translates as "Fragments of Love," makes it sound like much more than an a lowbrow weeper. Actually it is both a character study and a period piece. The setting is Jerusalem, 1968, and a lot of authentic props are around although anachronisms are there too if you look hard enough. (Women didn't wear more than one earring per ear in 1968.) The people with whom the heroine interacts are a colorful lot albeit one- dimensional, and we get to see some folk magic and hear Hebrew spiced with Ladino and Arabic. One thing we don't get is a strong sense of place, because without a big budget, one can maintain a period look in only a small shooting area. The actress on whom everything depends, Reymond Amsalem, holds attention every moment; in recent years she's been a reliable asset in quite a few of the best Israeli films.