The Human Resources Manager

THE HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGER is not only the main character of this smart, funny, touching film, it is also the theme: dealing with human responses to illogical situations takes skills few people have mastered. Based on the novel 'A Woman in Jerusalem' by Abraham B. Jehoshua, adapted for the screen by Noah Stollman, and directed with great flair by Eran Riklis, this little story begins as a strange tiny seed and grows into a lesson about the sanctity of the human spirit by films end.

A Human Resources Manager (Mark Ivanir is a multifaceted performance) is divorced from his wife (Reymond Amsalem) and only sees his daughter (Roni Koren) on occasion. He has been brought to Jerusalem by The Widow (Gila Almagor) to be the Human Resources Manager to Jerusalem's largest bakery because of his skills, but soon the climate changes: an Romanian ex-employee Yulia has been found dead due to a suicide bombing in Jerusalem, an employee unknown to the HR Manager, and the Press (in the person of 'The Weasel' - Guri Alfi - a looney photographer journalist) decides to make a case of corporate coldness in the situation. The Widow places the possible corporate disaster in the HR Manager's hands, and after much research, it is discovered that the body being kept in the city morgue cannot be buried without a family member 's signature. Yulia's ex-husband (Bogdan E. Stanoevitch) is uncovered but cannot sign for the body's release because the couple was divorced. The HR manager is directed to take the casket to Romania, have Yulia's mother (Irina Petrescu) sign for it, and bury the body there. The men - HR Manager, ex-husband, and Weasel - begrudgingly set off for Romania where they are met by the Israeli Counsel (Rosina Kambus) and her amour (Julian Negulesco) who offer their van and driver (Papil Panduru) to take the body to Yulia's home. At the town where Yulia had lived the group encounters Yulia's son (Noah Silver), a juvenile delinquent whom the father had thrown out of the home. Many conflicts arise before the boy joins the group, takes the body to the boy's grandmother who informs the little groups that Yulia lived and died in Jerusalem and must be returned there to be buried! The van collapses and the HR Manager and Weasel must return the body to Jerusalem in an army tank. It is an ongoing comedy of errors, but in the course of events the HR Manager rediscovers his own soft side of his humanity and learns the importance of human relations within families, towns, governments and people in general.

Though the story is potentially a very sad statement about how immigrants are treated by corporations and how victims of suicide bombings can be all but forgotten, but the writing of script keeps the all too human acts of errors and acts of personal forgiveness beautifully balanced. The entire cast is excellent, but Mark Ivanir as the Human Resources Manager makes the film work - a brilliant, understated performance that spreads over the entire range of human responses and reactions. The film is visually stunning, showing us the beauty of Jerusalem, the devastation of Romania, and the incredibly picturesque winter scenes in Romania's very catholic towns. In Hebrew, English and Romanian with English subtitles. It is a little gem of a film.

Grady Harp

I don't know how much of what the movie omits is in the novel, but as the movie stands, we have several people each of whose lives has taken a turning-- not always for the worse, but usually-- and the details of that past turning are vague. The full Hebrew title would translate as THE MISSION OF THE HUMAN RESOURCES MANAGER, and his mission takes him to the boondocks of Eastern Europe to meet the bereaved relatives of a murdered employee. It's a big contrast between familiar surroundings and exotic ones, and the contrast may be lost to viewers for whom the place where the action starts, Israel, is exotic anyway. Another thing lost is the word translated as MANAGER in the title. The word in the Hebrew title doesn't really mean "manager," it means "the appointee responsible." The protagonist (Mark Ivanir carries the movie well in this role) has less authority than he would like, and the plot takes him on a shaggy-dog road trip from one misfortune to another, becoming somewhat more light-hearted and philosophical along the way and showing many moments of altruism. There are some improbabilities and a few minor and unfortunate clichés, such as the fellow who-- like so many characters beset by a crisis in a movie-- had been trying to give up smoking. But the movie has momentum, the minor characters are colorful, the music is enjoyable, the sad and comic sides are well balanced, and I for one was left with a hankering to read the book. In English, by the way, the book is called A WOMAN IN JERUSALEM.

A man who gradually lost his way, in contact with other people with the same problem, remembers what is really important. When you sum it up like this it sounds very trite and predictable. Fortunately this movie isn't. Former military man who runs the human resources in the bakery like a war operation, has to accompany the body of a former employee back to unnamed Eastern European country( to those who can read it is obviously Romania). Stark, desolate landscape, country in transition and general lack of hope. Gray, flat land, gray post-socialist buildings and people seemingly gray, too, but only at first sight. There are bright colors of strong emotions, pale shades of despair and shockingly strong bursts of uncontrolled anger. All primal and deeply necessary to keep us alive, no matter what forsaken part of the world we were unfortunate to be born in. There is only one life and one skin and only as much blood and tears we can shed, and as much joy we can sustain before the inevitable end.

The Hebrew name of the film is a little longer than the one chosen by the distributors for the English version. It reads 'The Mission of the Human Resources Manager' and actually the word used is 'shlihut' which has a wider significance - it means not only mission, but also the acts of performing an important duty, or of being a messenger for important news. The news in this case are about a death, but the film touches only marginally the reasons and the absurdity of that death, and deals more about how the people who remained in life cope with the disappearance and how this impacts their lives - including the one of the messenger.

Based on a novel of AB Yehoshua the film tells the story of the aftermath of a terror attack, one of these crazy suicidal acts that took place during the second intifada about a decade ago. One of the victims of the attack is identified quite lately as a Romanian woman working a manual job in a bakery in the town. A beautiful woman whose face we know only from a photo and later from a short film made on a phone, whose body nobody came to claim or identify because she was one of the thousand of foreign workers who come to Israel and perform hard and low paid works nobody else wants to do in order to support their families back home. The duty to take the coffin with the body home to Romania, and try to compensate the family there falls on the manager of the human resources (the absurdity of the terminology is so well exposed by this film), a man who has problems of his own - solidly acted by Mark Ivanir, an actor I did not notice until now - he works more for the TV and games industry in the US, here he gets an opportunity to make a serious role in an Israeli film, and does it fine. What results is a trip in unknown territory for the Jerusalemite clerk and the journalist accompanying him (Guri Alfi, better known here as a stand-up comedian), a clash not only of two different cultures and but also of different approaches to life and death.

The film is not bad, but it's a missed opportunity. Made in 2010, a year when both the Romanian and Israeli films industry were riding high on waves of success, it could have brought together some of the best in the two schools of cinematography - the Israeli dramatic school of political cinema which after decades of avoiding the tough questions raised by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict succeeded in a few film that take a sharp and uncompromising look at the issues and the Romanian minimalist realism which looks back to the Communist era and the transition that followed, and also to the contemporary chaotic situation in Romania not only with anger, but also with humor and especially with human understanding. Amazingly, director Eran Riklis' style and place in the Israeli cinema fits rather well the Romanian cinema style. The problem lies in the folklorist approach taken in dealing with the Romanian reality. If the Israeli team would have taken a local director as consultant, they could have maybe avoided some of the stereotypes of the script. I should say that the Romanian actors do their best to fill in the holes of the story on this respect, but this is not always enough. Even so, it's a pleasure to see great actors like Irina Petrescu (a Romanian legend) or Gila Almagor who can be considered as her Israeli counterpart on the same cast (although they never meet on screen). And more than all, this is the last and final role in the career of Rozina Cambos. Despite its flaws Riklis' film has enough good parts to make for an interesting viewing.

The title Human Resource Manager of this movie has a task thrust upon him, completely unforeseen and probably not in his or any other HR Manager's job description. A female employee of his company, the largest bread bakery in Jerusalem, is killed in a terrorist attack, under circumstances which bring an embarrassing public relations nightmare to the company. The deceased woman was a recent immigrant from Romania (the actors who play her relatives speak Romanian, but the country is never actually named, only identified as a former communist country in Eastern Europe), and the owner of the bakery sends the HR Manager to escort the body to her homeland. Tagging along on the journey is the same muckraking photojournalist (known to the audience as "The Weasel") who brought the bad PR upon the bakery in the first place.

This movie could have taken any of a number of different tracks without any change in the plot line, in which the HRM encounters several bureaucratic or emotional obstacles upon arriving in Romania and meeting with local officials, the Israeli consul, and the teenage son and ex-husband of the deceased, all the while hoping to make this a short trip to get home in time to chaperone a school trip for his own neglected teenage daughter, and clashing with "The Weasel".

Had this been an American movie, I have could easily pictured it done as a "road/buddy" comedy, a rather slippery slope down which this movie could have descended to a bonehead movie a la A WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S.

At the other end of the spectrum, I did in fact see this movie as part of the Film Movement foreign film subscription series shown at a public library. I'm rather new to that series, and this movie was the third I'd seen. The first two were totally depressing: ILLEGAL, which showed the suffering of a Russian woman illegally in Belgium and undergoing deportation and separation from her teenage son, and THE COLOR OF THE MOUNTAIN, showing the takeover of a small Colombian village by narco-terrorists, and its impact on the children, their families and their school. This movie had the potential of going down that gloomy path as well.

Instead, this was the first one in the series where I actually felt good at the end. The poignancy and pathos of the HRM dealing with the deceased's relatives is well offset by the adventurous challenges he faces getting the deceased to her final resting place, and by the comedic sparring between him and the journalist.

This movie was very nicely balanced. For my own personal tastes, I might have liked it a little better if there had been a touch more comedy, one or two more laugh out loud moments, but if the production crew were wary of the slippery slope to A WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S, I have no quarrel with that call. It's not quite a perfect movie for me, but nearly so.