The Israeli movie My One and Only, which just opened in theaters around the country, aims high as it attempts to combine Jewish mysticism and Torah study with the mysterious style of a director like David Lynch.
For some, that description will be enough to get them to order a ticket, and the more you are interested in Jewish holy books, the more you will get out of this film.
But for anyone who just wants to have fun at the movies, it’s a misfire.
That’s a shame because there are many well-acted, well-written scenes and an intriguing main plotline. It follows multiple stories, all of which, on some level, dramatize mystical concepts.
The central story is that of a young wife and mother, Shira (Talya Bartfeld Diskin, who gives a compelling performance), who turns to her rabbi’s wife, Miri (Navit Sitbon), with a complaint familiar to horror-movie viewers: Her husband, Noam (Nadav Antman Ron), is not her husband – he’s been replaced by an imposter who looks just like him.
Is Shira’s husband possessed, or is she simply imagining it?
Her reasons for suspecting this switch are very prosaic, and will be familiar to anyone who’s ever been married: He seems indifferent; he came home from the store without buying what she asked him to; he doesn’t remember what he said about her blouse a few months ago.
It seems as if, in the tradition of the classic Rosemary’s Baby, the director is leaving us to decide whether her husband is possessed or whether Shira is just neurotic, a new mother who feels dismayed that her husband has lost interest in her.
But then there is another detail: his dominant hand seems to have switched. Miri tells her husband (Shimon Mimran) about it, and he is skeptical that anything is genuinely wrong, and quotes various Jewish texts to her.
Miri wants Shiri to see a famous psychiatrist (Zohar Strauss), who turns out to have become a mystic who performs exorcisms, while Shira resists the notion that she needs mental help.
Miri is in touch with another young woman, Gaia (Inbal Raz), who is about to get married and who, although she is secular, has just become interested in studying Jewish texts.
Gaia asks her fiancé, Idan (Yoel Rosenkier), why he decided that she was the one, as the couple sit with their families tasting the food at the venue where their wedding will be held. This leads to a reminiscence by one of the couple’s fathers about how he fell in love, but when he tells the story, his wife says that it’s all about the girlfriend he had before her, continuing the theme of doubles and replacement.
There is also a waitress, Heli (Ella Armony), at the wedding hall, who is caring for her senile mother who may or may not be possessed by some kind of spirit.
Suddenly, and this is where the movie lost me and never got me back, the two actresses playing Heli and Gaia switch roles.
A familiar cinematic device that works better in theory than practice
This is not an unprecedented device, but frankly, it always annoys me.
The master director Luis Buñuel did something similar in his 1977 film, That Obscure Object of Desire, where he had two very different actresses, one elegant and chilly, the other fiery and sensual, playing the same character at different times, and there, it worked well.
But here, when these two pretty ingenues swap places, it doesn’t seem to mean anything. I imagine we are supposed to think about how the course of anyone’s life could change in an instant, or how we might all have easily ended up with a different partner under certain circumstances. But neither actress is distinctive, and it just takes you out of the action and makes you think about the director’s logic.
There’s also a sequence where Shira goes to visit her grandmother (the always entertaining Shosha Goren), who tells her that her own husband was replaced years ago, after trauma he experienced in combat. The grandmother, who is not observant, believes he was taken by aliens, rather than an evil spirit.
It goes on like this, and the biggest suspense is whether the actresses will switch back. Along the way, there are some interesting scenes and ideas, which make it seem that there is a well-constructed movie struggling to get out of this muddled script.
Tauber made the movie with his wife, producer Eliya Tauber – with whom he has four children – over a period of 10 years, and that’s a nice story.
I have a feeling it would be more fun to watch an interview with them talking about the ideas behind the movie than it is to actually see their film.