Gazing out on the placid Galilee from the roof of her apartment building, the 40-something Aviva appears content with her life.
And yet this Mizrahi hotel-kitchen employee has three spoiled, lethargic children and a spoiled, unemployed husband to care for. It doesn’t compute, except for one thing: the protagonist of Aviva My Love revels in being the glue that keeps her chronically dissatisfied family intact.
Aviva is the only one who can soothe her unhappily married sister and calm their irrational, half-cracked mother. She is, to borrow a word, saintly. (She has the narrow, tired, plain-Jane face of a saint, to boot.)
But even a saint needs the occasional escape, and, as it happens, this unlikely heroine is a talented writer. In stolen moments, on the job or late at night, she collects the offbeat details and petty insults of everyday life and transforms them into glowing, magical short stories.
Aviva My Love, which screens at the Seattle Jewish Film Festival on Sat., April 5, presents us with a figure from the 19th century, the female writer who puts everyone else’s needs and wishes ahead of her own. Aviva (Assi Levy, giving a lovely performance) is a “household angel,” to use the literary term, without the freedom or means to pursue her own ambitions.
She’s an anachronism, but one who wins our sympathy from the very opening scene. As the movie unfolds, however, and Aviva skips every opportunity to stand up for herself, the contemporary viewer gets impatient.
Writer-director Shemi Zarhin (Bonjour Monsieur Shlomi) blends comedy and melodrama to unusual effect here, and turns what could easily have been a grim, depressing portrait into a seductively optimistic yarn. The slightly off-kilter tone certainly connected with Israelis, for Aviva My Love was a box-office smash and won six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Actress and Best Director.
That said, the narrative does not advance via events so much as by verbal confrontations. It is a measure of Zarhin’s writing skill, and our empathy for Aviva, that it takes quite a while to realize that the director is overly fond of rapid-fire conversations edited like ping-pong games (or boxing matches).
The potential agent for Aviva’s transmutation from workaday drone to fulfilled author is a creative writing professor enlisted by her meddlesome sister. A one-time bestselling novelist, Oded (an egotistical yet vulnerable Sasson Gabai) corrects Aviva’s manuscripts and offers ambivalent encouragement, but we sense he has an ulterior motive.
Although Aviva’s family resents neither her creative abilities nor her dreams, they do nothing to make her life or her writing “schedule” easier. It’s almost as if they realize their contribution is to provide the raw, messy dross that she weaves into gold. So they unabashedly act out on purpose.
The twist in the tale is that once Aviva lets go — rather, abandons — her yearning to express herself on paper, the family shapes up in no time. At that point, her sacrifice, her martyrdom, is complete. But that’s also when Aviva stops taking guff and starts handing it out.
Tiberias provides a refreshing change from the usual movie locales of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. It’s the director’s hometown, but it’s also a fitting setting for a story about the new Israel, where opportunism butts up against limited opportunities and selfishness, and where apathy and resentment are pervasive.
This larger picture encourages us to view Aviva My Love as much more than a feminist fable or an anti-feminist parable. But it’s tough to resist the temptation.