SFIFF Dispatch. 6.

After seeing both too many films and too few, seeing many very good films and probably none that I'd deem superb, and after picking errantly for my next to last film (I won't mention which, nor will I fully blame it for my dozing off as it unspooled), I finished the 61st SFIFF's impressively diverse, respectably not-too-Hollywood slate with a memorable if uneven debut feature from Israel.

Mushon Salmona just won the SFIFF's New Directors Award (after winning the Special Jury Prize at the Jerusalem Film Festival) for Vasermil, a striking, edgy drama about three teenage boys whose lives in a working class neighborhood in Be'er-Sheva, Israel, intersect via soccer. Shlomi (Nadir Eldad) is the captain of the school's team but also a pizza delivery boy working for a psychotically abusive boss and whose brother is a gangster.

Then there's the Ethiopian-Israeli Adiel (Adiel Zamro), an incredibly talented player with dreams of going to greater things with his feet but who also has to care for a younger brother and an ailing mother, in addition to a great deal of racism (some of which, initially, comes from Shlomi). And Dima (David Taplitzky), a sullen Russian immigrant with a depressive, verbally abusive father (most of the adult males in this film are pretty poor role models); he sells ecstasy to earn money and ends up being forced to assist the school's soccer team in order to not be expelled. Ultimately, all three of them come to appreciate each other as they work together on the team, and if there's a certain inevitability to where much of this leads, it's shot and acted with such immediacy that it manages to hold us enthralled until the rather abrupt ending.

Several times, in fact, Vasermil presents us with scenes that could be cliched and yet they have a raw power that makes it easier to overlook. The young cast is outstanding. It's also one of the most unflinching looks at the tension burbling under the surface in modern day Israel that I've ever seen.

And the soccer scenes won me over, too; granted, it helps to be a soccer player and fan as I am, but the game action, which is usually a weak spot in these sorts of films, is very well done; clearly both the filmmaker and the young actors - each of them nonprofessionals playing versions of themselves - understand the game and how to depict it realistically. (Adiel Zamro must really play the sport; if he doesn't, he sure fooled me.) Each game works in the film as a mini-play; there is tension, but also character development in each reaction, pass, assist, fall. The first game is an amusing set piece with the high school team playing an older, much bigger squad, resulting in several hilarious moments (and in which the heavy smoker Dima takes over as goalie, in a bit of a farfetched plot thread that still somehow works). The second game, a tournament at the eponymous stadium, is more tense, and over more quickly, as the pressures and dangers of the outside world take over.

The film is full of beautiful little moments built around these genuine young actors' easy naturalism: Dima playing the piano for his mother and sister; Adiel lovingly making a sandwich for his younger brother, who worries Adiel will be leaving for a soccer boarding school; Shlomi at home, dealing with his arrogant older brother and the rest of his family; and scenes with the team's coach, the one redeeming adult male in the film, maybe even a little too good to be true, who believes in these boys even as they will clearly disappoint him. All these things work so well at times that I overlooked some of the less believable and less focused aspects of the story. We also don't quite understand what makes some of the peripheral characters tick; the pizza shop owner is an unrelenting prick but we never get a glimpse of his humanity; Dima's father might be depressed because of the economy, his status, missing Russia - but we never really get why; it just feels convenient. Despite all this, and despite that ending, the short, sharp suddenness of which might call to mind Ken Loach or the French New Wave, Vasermil is still a winner. It cuts in sharp, and deep. And captures adolescent confusion beautifully.

(It was also interesting to see an entirely different film after The Wackness yet again depicting a good-hearted teenage kid selling drugs on the side; as in The Wackness, Dima's parents are a bit of a depressed mess. I'm not even sure what to make of this, except it's a bit depressing as a trend, especially given that it's all too believable.)

Posted by dwhudson at May 10, 2008 2:17 PM