Late Marriage
I went into this pretty blind other than knowing it was Israeli, and the first few minutes had me thinking that watching it might not be a good idea. It starts off with a wife bathing her husband setting up a pair of characters who are pretty inconsequential with some awkward cultural humour, and while it wasn't bad none of it really resonated and the production values seemed mediocre. The film got a whole lot better as the focus shifts to more interesting situations, but the tone of that introduction, for better and worse, stays throughout the film.
Soon after the first scene we're introduced to our lead, an apparently smart but not very ambitious man in his early 30s whose parents are anxious for him to get married. Like most of the other characters in the film I didn't find him to be entirely sympathetic, but he's interesting to watch and profoundly human. The rest of the film revolves around his parents trying to get him attached to an acceptable young woman while he ambivalently struggles against them trying to pursue his own interests. The film relies a lot on its performances and that's where it really shines, no matter how I felt about the characters at any given point in time they always felt genuine and complex, and the film really showcased the battle of wills without giving any viewpoint more weight. This in turn made the narrative very organic and the ending came as a genuine surprise, not because it was farfetched but, because any possibility would have been equally plausible given what leads up to it.
In many ways this reminded me of Rohmer, who I love, with it's sympathy for for flawed characters, focus on human interaction, organic development and an inconclusive resolution. More than anything, though, their similarity lies in the way the film left me thinking about the psychology of its characters and the way it extrapolates to society at large. In this case the struggles between individuality and community, the social and cultural mores that influence our actions in even the most intimate settings, and the relationships of parents and children even when those children are grown. Koshashvili is no Rohmer, but I still got quite a bit out of the film. In short, I could have liked it more but I still liked it a lot and I'm glad to have watched something I otherwise would have put off.