The main good thing about this movie is that Liron Levo, who plays Juliette Binoche's adopted Israeli brother, is a heroic hunk of sex on a stick in it. It seems well-shot, too. I'm just amazed that this film has such a talented, attractive cast, a promising idea, and an acclaimed director and this movie is so off. I feel like a lot of it is that the pacing feels really off but I also don't know if I like the way it deals with the issues by the end of the movie. The movie begins with Uli (Liron Levo) on a train to Avignon. He meets a Palestinian woman and they get along well and end up making out on the train after schooling the passport guy about the nature of national identity in the modern world. Hiam Abbass, who was so fabulous in Amreeka, is also fabulous here as the Palestinian lady but she's only around for like three minutes. Uli makes his way to his father's deathbed in Avignon. The dad is dead. There's a black lady singing arias over the dead man. Juliette Binoche is the dead man's daughter and she's acting like a sort of spoiled lunatic. She tells her brother she wants to leave her husband and she dances around naked. All of this felt very dull and plodding. Juliette Binoche learns from the will about the identity of the daughter she had given away as an adolescent in Israel and that her father had had a secret relationship with her. She needs to go back to Israel with her brother to find her daughter in the Gaza, which is about to be evacuated. This movie had good moments but overall I found it tiresome. I also found these lunatics Jews in Gaza tiresome and felt like the movie was too kind on them. I mean, they were told to evacuate in advance. The issue requires a certain finesse and this movie didn't have it. Give me Eytan Fox over Amos Gitai any day of the week. C-
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