Beyond the Mountains and Hills

Beyond the Mountains and the Hills is about a family that is connected, yet each have their own secrets. At the heart of it is David who has recently retired from the army, and is trying to find his way in the rest of the world. There is also the mother, a teacher, and two teenaged high school kids.

As most of us do, they each have their own problems and must find ways to deal with them. However, watching the mother navigate an inappropriate relationship, or how the son reacts to it just isn't interesting. Watching the daughter is even worse, as she's just another teen making decisions which are based more on rebellion than on logic.

At least the father's arc is a little interesting. After failure in business, he unloads his gun into nothingness, only to find out the next day someone died on the hill he was shooting at via gunshot wound.

All these individual arcs lead to everybody having a feeling of guilt, but not really leaning on each other for support. And as a movie it was just not involving enough to keep you interested in each person's guilt.

Eran Kolerin's previous film, The Exchange, had to do (if I understood it at all, and maybe I didn't) with intentionally attacking the connection between people and their context. In this new one, a man is dislodged from his context-- he retires from his job in the standing army-- and he finds himself a bit of a stranger among his family. His daughter, his wife, and his son all have secrets from him although each of them also reflects an aspect of his own tendencies. The scenes of the film are paced in surprising ways. Some moments last longer than a viewer would normally expect, others are cut off abruptly, and sometimes the film skips moments that we might expect to see. A soundtrack that repeatedly returns to Israeli consensus music, the great Israeli songbook, sometimes sounds ironic against the edgy conflict-ridden situations but also recalls the film's epigraph, in which poet David Avidan remarks that we have nowhere else to go-- meaning not just as a nation among nations, but also as individuals among the vicissitudes of life. The movie leaves some matters unresolved, and it certainly doesn't follow anything like the clean arc of Kolerin's most popular movie, The Band's Visit, but it implies, in a more hopeful way than The Exchange did, that whatever may happen to you or around you, you can decide to define yourself apart from it.