There Were Nights

I caught a preview last night. The movie starts with a rather flamboyant musical dress rehearsal, which turns out not to set the tone for the rest of the scenes but to contrast with them. They tell a somber story about a theatrical family. Auteur Ron Ninio is a second-generation theater director himself and he bases important aspects of the story on his own family. I'm sure I was not the smartest person in the audience, but it took me a while to figure out that the action was switching between two time periods, with two actresses playing the same character at different ages. It also took a while before a scene came along that made me sit up and say "Aha, the plot has started." I guess the emphasis is on the complex family situation and the acting, and there was some excellent acting from Jenya Dodina and from the man who seems to get all the good leading character roles in Israeli cinema, Moshe Ivgy. His daughter (on and off screen) Dana Ivgy tends to assume a blank look while the actress playing the same character at a younger age supplies the emotional resonance for her. For an Israeli viewer, the movie is lacking a sense of place; presumably we are somewhere in greater Tel Aviv, more or less by default, but I didn't see any landmarks, and something to anchor the action geographically would have been welcome.