Disengagement (2007) Reviews

• Slow, disconnected, disorienting, and only occasionally touching

  Sarasilien2012-04-08

  Although nominally about Israel's 2005 evacuation of settlements in Gaza, the bulk of the 2007 film "Disengagement" takes place in France. Uli (Liron Levo), an Israeli policeman, travels to Avignon for his wealthy adoptive father's funeral. There, he reunites with his flighty sister Ana (Juilette Binoche). In his will, Uli and Ana's father leaves most of his property to Dana (Dana Ivgy), the daughter Ana gave birth to when in her early teens. Dana currently lives on an Israeli settlement in Gaza. Per her father's instructions, Ana must travel there to meet the adult daughter she has not seen since infancy. "Disengagement" is very short on dialog and exposition. Many questions -- like, "Who is this person?" "Why is she singing opera?" and "Why is she acting like that?" -- arise, but few are answered. Scenes and shots, on the other hand, tend to be very long and very static. This style of filmmaking does allow emotions and meanings to emerge nonverbally from characters and settings, but few scenes in "Disengagement" really benefit from this treatment. Aside from a brief encounter between Uli and a Palestinian woman he meets while traveling to France, all of the film's strongest scenes come during its final 15-20 minutes, as Israeli police prepare to remove settlers from Gaza and then begin doing so. The initial encounter between Ana and her long-lost daughter Dana is touching as well, but, as with everything else in this film, drags on far too long. "Disengagement" would probably make a good short story or novella, but as a film it is a failure. Don't waste your time.

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• An extremely bad script

  erica-32008-12-04

  The excellent Israeli director Amos Gitai has used this time a script to provide a vehicle for great names like Juliette Biboche, Barbara Hendricks, Jeanne Moreau, but has little to do with any real situation. An Israeli policeman travels to Avignon to attend the funeral of his stepfather. He sleeps on the street amid the homeless but wears a suit for the funeral! His beautiful step sister Ana who has not seen her daughter since early childhood and has not kept any contact with her, discovers that the daughter lives in a settlement in Gaza. Quite strange, the late father of Ana did visit his granddaughter occasionally! Instantly Ana travels to Gaza, succeeds to penetrate the sealed-off territory from which religious settlers were to be evacuated and wanders amid these settlers until she founds her daughter. The film has some beautifully filmed moments depicting the confusion, religious frenzy of settlers and cold blood of the policemen involved, but otherwise is very close to the usually sold kitch.

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• A Nutshell Review: Disengagement

  DICK STEEL2009-04-19

  For an Amos Gitai film, I thought this had the most impactive prologue amongst those that I've watched to date, which succinctly sums up the political themes that his films often explore. While it might have thrusted you right into the thick of (in)action, you'll soon realize that he has a tremendous ability to gift wrap his points amongst the most mundane and ordinary. A Dutch-Palestinian lady gets chatted up by a French Israeli man on a train. They share a cigarette moment, and soon realize that they have a lot more in common than they initially realized. The two strangers's chance meeting soon turn into lust/love at first sight, probably a nod in the direction that even amongst what would be perceived as the most irreconcilable groups of people, can find common ground and understanding, and kiss and make up. Only that there are those in the world like the authorities wielding some power, could make unreasonable demands to try and derail peace efforts, like that train soldier who might have stepped out of his boundary in asserting and demanding that he be listened to and complied with. Alas the movie failed to keep the pace with its wonderful opening, and for the most parts the build up to the finale sagged heavily under very dire straits stemming from an uninteresting plot which failed to capitalize on the Israeli man Uli (Liron Levo) whom we got introduced, but shifted its attention to the more illustrious Juliette Binoche's Ana, Uli's half sister whom he is meeting in France because of their father's demise, and to discover just what his will entailed. The story found it necessary to go through an entire backstory for nothing, only for us to know little red herring nuggets of information such as Ana's estranged relationship with her separated husband whom we do not see on screen, and that slightly incestuous (well, not exactly) temptations that both Uli and Ana go through, with the latter being the temptress. It tried to address issues like staying with someone who you don't love, only out of convenience, which Ana confessed to be doing, because she's a lazy soul. But in fact her character flits into mood swings one end to the other, that it's not tough to understand how unappealing she can get, good looker or not. Things start to pick up slightly midway through the film when the actual seed of the story was sown, with the reading of the deceased's will, having to instruct Ana to travel to Gaza to pass on her dad's inheritance to her abandoned daughter Dana (Dana Ivgy) in person. So begins a road trip for the siblings, which is convenient anyway because Uli was beginning to fade away like a side show, and his return to Israel gives him a chock load of things to do, since he's a police officer, and have been given orders, together with the army, to clear Gaza of its Israeli settlers since Israel has pulled out of the Gaza Strip. Ordering your fellow men off their plot of land and homes are never easy, and this story arc provides that "action packed"moment in Disengagement. The other thread would be of course Ana's quest in locating her daughter, like finding a needle in the perennial haystack, made more difficult because she doesn't speak the language of her countrymen. The story arcs tangent off at this point, but you know there'll definitely be moments for a collision course later in the film. Through Uli's eyes we see how their evacuation operation gets carried out, having to be compassionate, yet stern in a thankless job that involves ejecting by any means possible the settlers who are protesting their rights. One involves grabbing the people and forcing them onto chartered buses to take them back to the mainland, and on the other having heavy machinery either bulldoze everything insight, or the utilization of cranes to literally lift homes off the soil. One can imagine if one is forced away from your home at the snap of a finger, and that is definitely something difficult to swallow. Disengagement unfortunately is like a self-fulling prophecy, having the middle portion starkly dragging against the powerful prologue and finale. If only it could find a better gel to stick both ends together in a more engaging fashion.

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• Wide Awake And Transmigrating

  TemporaryOne-12017-02-21

  Disengagement sails through and melts mental and emotional and physical boundaries. Dutch-Palestinians, French-Israelis, an American living in Sweden performing in German who works with refugees worldwide for the UN (Barbra Hendricks), Orthodox Jews cultivating life in Canaan. The journey begins with a fixed, normalized prelude to a transcultural tryst punctuated by a molecular twist that expresses the grand themes of the film, glides through an urban Avignon landscape that could readily be the urban landscape of Gaza City or Tel Aviv or Singapore or Chicago or Los Angeles or London or Cape Town or Dubai or Naples, languidly lilts in choreography through the lush vermilion interiour of an Avignon estate owned by a deceased French Jew whose death brings together his hypersensual sophisticated Dutch-Palestinian daughter (who resonates the biblical Delilah) and solemn French-Israeli son (an adopted step-son who resonates with the biblical Samson as he evades her sybaritic act of seduction), and from that moment forward the film showcases womankind on the verge of a mental breakdown because of barriours (erected by whom?) of interiour fires that are smiting her already-burnt-out identity. From the stable, controlled, prosperity of her Avignon life, Ana, a disengaged Dutch-Palestinian who thinks herself a coward who has died many times before her death, takes emotional flight as she embarks on a transcontinental voyage to the 2000 heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: Gaza. There resides her life-pulse - her Palestinian heritage and the daughter she abandoned as a child, an Orthodox Jewish resident of Gaza who is being forcibly disengaged from her Palestinian homeland. Her inner turmoil externalizes itself and blazes forth in wave after wave of passionate emotion the closer and closer she approaches the soil of Gaza, the flesh of her daughter, and the soul of her ancestry. As Israelis betray Israelis, and Palestinians betray Palestinians, and both betray each other, the landscape is completely ruptured and deterritorialized, the pillars of life in Gaza are pulled down, our identities are stripped away, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Jewish-Palestinian identity struggles and patriarchal hierarchy are shattered, and all that is left are these new lines of unregulated emotions and human relationships which are destined to shatter all further resistance and counterattacks and disengagement. Place to place, religion to religion, culture to culture, multicultures interweaving into hybrid polycultures, we circumnavigate this globe throughout our lives, we become disengaged from who we are and who we were and who we will be, the forces of life compelling us to absorb all identities and histories, the forces of life compelling those same identities and histories to melt away into one undeniable truth - we are all of the same flesh and blood, our history and culture and identity are shared, and only through disengagement can we perceive reality with clarity, and only through disengagement can we shatter the stranglehold of the Israeli-Palestinian deadlock and shatter the borders and begin to construct one united plane of existence. Amos presented the crux of the Israel/Arab issue brilliantly. The decision to say, okay, fine, you win, we'll kick all the undesirables out of Gaza to make you happy, we'll make sure that all Arabs stay here and all Jews stay there and none of you have to ever engage each other again, out of sight out of mind no more engagement no more interaction, we'll ignore the fact that your histories and cultures and religions and societies are irrevocably engaged/fused-together, we'll ignore the fact that your very flesh and bone is bone and the same, we'll ignore the fact that disengagement (emotional and psychological and political and religious and cultural and social, not merely physical exile) is the very reason why the Israeli-Arab conflict began, we'll ignore the fact that "disengagement" acts in opposition to the very goals the people who want "disengagement" claim to pursue, we'll ignore the fact that you can't create a stable society when the cornerstone of the society is predicated upon disengagement, you can't solve any of the issues in this world by "disengaging", disengagement is antithetical to existence, to creation, to communication, to building cross-cultural coalitions across the planet, to perpetuating humanity. Barbra Hendricks has lived throughout Europe, she's of African descent, a minority diaspora, like diaspora Jews and Palestinians and others. The significance of her presence parallels and re-enforces the film's questions and themes. She is an avatar for Amos Gitai: consider his own "disengaged" statelessness/rootlessness: Israeli Jew constantly on the move, dual citizen of France, speaks multiple languages, artistically productive on a far-reaching scale, political/social activist, his films an operatic lament over retrogression and depravity and failures within the political/social/cultural canvases of Judaism and Israel, Hendricks singing over loss of a Worldly American-European Jew who lived beyond boundaries. She is a also a foil to Ana - the former decided to be a citizen of the world and left the US and lived her life to the fullest, the latter (Ana) became trapped in confusion over her identity, dispossessed and disengaged and alienated and drifting. Hendricks and Gitai are trying to heal the dispossessed and disengaged of the world, and they speak in many languages to achieve this goal, the language of music and cinema, the language of compassion and humanity, the language of politics and society, the languages of American and French and Italian and German and Hebrew and Arab.... Compare Hendricks to the Palestinian and Israeli (specifically, ultra-Orthodox Jewry) - they feel they cannot live, cannot exist, unless they live self-autonomously in their (shared) ancestral homeland, their sole goal the achievement of self-determination within their historic homeland, without which they feel they are being ground under foot and obliterated from the tables of memory. Hendricks represents the opposite, people who never let boundaries/demographics define them, people who feel their home is the entire world, possibilities endless, people who do not allow themselves to be solely defined by borders and ancestries and geographical locations, people who engage themselves with the world in its entirety.

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• A good stylized drama

  johno-212008-01-16

  I recently saw this at the 2008 Palm Springs International Festival of Films. This is a good film by veteran filmmaker, director and writer Amos Gitai and it's interesting to see an event that was recently an international news story recreated in a feature film. The film's title comes from the 2005 forced evacuation of Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip by Israel in a move that rather than calling it giving up the Gaza the government of Israel referred to it as disengagement. The film begins on a train when a beautiful Palestinian woman shares conversation and a cigarette with a handsome Israeli man. They each have several different ethnic backgrounds to their genealogy bu Israeli and Palestinian are what stand out. "We're all Bedouin's" the woman flatly observes referring to the Arab and non-Arab nomadic tribes of the Middle East. The film then turns to it's storyline about a Israeli soldier Uli (Leron Levo) returning to his father's home in France for his funeral. His sister Ana (Juliette Binoche) is also there for the funeral and finds out that the daughter Dana (Dana Ivgy) that she gave up is a schoolteacher at a Kibbutz on the Gaza who Ana's father had been in contact with and wanted to leave a large part of his estate to. The funeral features a strange scene with American soprano Barbara Harris singing over the old man's body. An American black woman who now lives in Sweden singing a German opera over the corpse of a French-Jew is rather odd. Harris in reality is a champion of human rights and works closely as a UN Ambassador for Life for refugee causes so the director uses this to underscore the plight of those in the Gaza who were forced to leave during the Israeli pullout. Levo's acting is a little flat and uninspired and Binoche's acting is over the top and is in fact over acting. The story set in France gets a little dull at times but becomes energized once they arrive in Gaza. Uli on duty to evacuate settlers and Ana to find her daughter. I would give this a 7.0 out of 10.

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