Sex, family, betrayal, and very poor policing in Muayad Alayan's melodrama, THE REPORTS ON SARAH AND SALEEM

"Let not make this more than it is," snaps Israeli cafe owner Sarah to the Palestinian man, Saleem, who delivers her bread and is also fucking the daylights out of her, to their mutual satisfaction, in the new Palestine/ Germany/Netherlands co-production, THE REPORTS ON SARAH AND SALEEM. But what exactly is "this"? It's not Romeo and Juliet by a long shot, and in fact, it's not much more than any other typical sexual dalliance you'd encounter between consenting adulterers.

Ah, location, location, location -- right?  And because our adulterers are here, in the Israel/Palestine conundrum, the affair takes on all kinds of unwanted, unpleasant attachments that eventually involve each of the lovers' spouses, their children (one as yet unborn) and the "authorities" who control both locations.

The Palestinian filmmaker, Muayad Alayan (shown at left), working from a screenplay by his brother, Rami Musa Alayan, has concocted a very interesting, mostly engrossing situation (said to be based on fact) in which his two protagonists are neither very intelligent nor even particularly likable. In fact, the character we end up most rooting for is Saleem's wife. (Sarah's husband, a high-level policeman, turns out to be an asshole.)

What happens here, what the authorities "make" of the situation, and how this affects not only the title characters -- Saleem played by Adeeb Safadi, above, left, and below; Sarah by Sivane Kretchner, above, right, and at bottom -- but also their families and friends, turns a hot, sexual tryst into something impossibly severe and nasty.

As you might expect, the Israelis possess the lion's share of the power and use it to their own ends, while the the Palestinians do the same, with the lesser amount they have to muster garnering less results. None of it works well for the protagonists and finally begins to dirty those around them, too. (That's Maisa Abd Elhadi, below, as Saleen's wife.)

TrustMovies' problems with The Reports on Sarah and Saleem has less to do with the set-up, which is a fine one, than with its execution, which is given over too much to coincidence -- a child conveniently breaking some glass allows for an important escape-- and a little too much ignorance or stupidity on the part of everyone from Sarah and Saleem to the authorities on both sides of the fence. Those Israelis appear awfully slow on the uptake until, all of a sudden -- would they take that long to track some phone calls? -- they smarten up. (Ishai Golan, below, portrays Sarah's husband.)

The movie does give new, if actually untrue in this case, meaning to the idea that the personal is political. Well, not unless the powers-that-be want to make it so. Toward the conclusion the ironies grow a little heavy-handed and suddenly things descend into high melodrama and near camp before concluding on a note of feel-good female bonding. I had trouble buying into the latter half of the film, but you might manage it a bit better. On the technical side, all aspects -- from cinematography to set design to editing --  are impressive.

Released by DADA Films, running 127 minutes, in Arabic and Hebrew with English subtitles (a little English is spoken now and again), the movie opens here in South Florida this Friday, July 12: in Miami at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, in Fort Lauderdale at the Classic Gateway 4, in Boca Raton at the Regal Shadowood and Living Room Theatres, and at the Movies of Delray and Movies of Lake Worth. To view all currently scheduled playdates, cities and theaters, click here and scroll down.

Asghar Farhadi's FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY gets U.S. theatrical premiere at Film Forum

The more movies I see from Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi, the more impressed I am. This is true even though the films I've lately seen were made years before his Oscar-winning A Separation and his following film, The Past. Opening this week is a ten-year-old movie titled FIREWORKS WEDNESDAY, which is almost as fine a film as About Elly, from 2009, which opened here only last year and is, in TrustMovies' estimation, the pinnacle of Farhadi's work so far.

The Iranian filmmaker, shown at right, is the only one I know of who gives us Iran's bourgeoisie in all its troubling, fascinating, gee-they're-kinda-like-us entirety. It is difficult to view the first three of these films, in fact, without being stuck by how little fundamentalist religion appears to rule. The key word here is appears, of course, because, fundamentalist ideals do penetrate and control. And yet -- ah, the endearing/disconcerting predilection of human beings toward denial and hypocrisy -- Iranians do seem to circumvent fundamentalism when they need or want to.

This is why I suspect that Farhadi has mostly circumvented the censors. He manages with almost amazing consistency and honesty to show us Iranians living within their cultural and religious boundaries while at the same time struggling to rise above them.

Yet his characters never give voice to anything negative about their culture/religion. No -- they simply show us their specific situations and how they handle these. So we can watch them struggling to be human, while the censors can see them as moving outside their restricted lives and having to paying the price of unhappiness.

This is quite the tightrope walk, but Mr. Farhadi manages it beautifully, unlike his countryman Jafar Panahi, who is more vocal and open in his criticism -- and has paid for it by, so far as I know, still being under some weird form of house arrest. (Though he did manage to make the great film Taxi while in this "subdued" state, so maybe this sort of "somewhat-censorship" agrees with him by forcing him into the kind of alternating submission, insistence and pretzel twists that lead to humanitarian movie masterpieces.)

In any case, back to Fireworks Wednesday, the plot of which entwines a middle-aged couple's marital troubles (two photos above) with a young bride-to-be cleaning lady (seated, above, and at left, below) and the not-so-young woman (standing above, left) who lives across the hall. The movie takes place within a single day and night, during which we learn everything we need to know about these people to understand what they're going through and why. As usual, Farhadi identifies with all his major characters, and so, eventually, do we.

His film begins with a simply priceless scene (above) that works symbolically and realistically -- involving a chador and a motorcycle -- and manages, without raising its voice (or even suggesting this) to question tradition, fundamentalism, patriarchy, and a whole lot more. From there we bounce from one event to the next, as the movie becomes a surprisingly suspenseful tale of possible adultery, friendship and several instances of help and betrayal.

Before the film is finished, that chador has gotten up to all kinds of odd things, and our sympathies have been tossed back and forth among the various characters and their friends. By the end, the filmmaker has given us yet another amazing, in-depth tale of middle-class life in modern Iran.

A Grasshopper Film release and running 104 minutes, Fireworks Wednesday opens this Wednesday, March 16, at Film Forum in New York City, where it will have a two-week run. As for other playdates and cities, I am not sure, Perhaps the distributor -- a newcomer in the field of foreign, independent and documentary films -- will see fit to tell us soon.

Mathieu Amalric tries his hand at Georges Simenon in a cold 'n clammy THE BLUE ROOM

I'm only luke-warm to THE BLUE ROOM, which surprises me, considering how much I've enjoyed the work of Mathieu Amalric, especially as an actor (he both stars in and directs this movie) and also as a filmmaker (Le Stad de Wimbledon, The Screen Illusion). Not having read the novel by Georges Simenon on which the film is based, I'm going only via what I viewed on screen. This is, pretty much, a nicely formal, old-fashioned (right down to the size of the screen: 1.33:1), traditional (despite the nudity, including some full-frontal from both sexes), psychological murder-mystery non-thriller (Amalric appears to have deliberately drained away any possibilities of actual suspense, chills or thrills).

This last assessment is not necessarily a negative, for the director/actor (shown at right) seems intent on putting character (within the framework of the society at large) ahead of all the standard stuff we seem to want from our mysteries. But what we get from our characters, every last one of them, is gloomy and morose. These people are about as glum as characters come. Granted Amalric/Simenon may be indicting a society or class. But, really: If anything remotely pleasant happens here, you can be sure it will soon come back to bite you and the character in the ass.

The story is simplicity itself: a married man (Amalric, above, right) has an affair with a married woman (Stéphanie Cléau, above, left), which neither cuckolded spouse (Léa Drucker, below, plays the wronged wife) seems to know about (though both may suspect). Death, maybe murder, ensues, and the illusion of justice must be served -- even if justice itself may or may not have been done.

For all the attention to character on display, in the end we don't really learn that much about anyone -- except that these are very unhappy people. Style-wise, the movie is mostly a pleasure to view. Color (or often the lack of it) plays its part; both interior and exterior shots are well composed and lighted (cinematography, by Christophe Beaucarne, is top-notch); and the performances are all that the adaptation (by Amalric and Ms Cléau) allows.

Amalric and Cléau prove darkly passionate lovers (with love scenes,above and below, to match) in a relationship that seems to hark back more to school days than present-day, while the wonderful Ms Drucker (so fabulous in the under-seen The Man of My Life) does what she can with a role that's not allowed to budge.

Although the movie runs only 75 minutes, it seems rather longer, due to the low-key, unchanging, enervating atmosphere it conjures. Don't get me wrong: Amalric proves an extremely economical filmmaker in many ways, so this is an accomplishment of sorts. And some will find the movie exactly to their taste, I suspect. But what passes for subtlety in certain circles can look pretty heavy-handed to others of us.

The Blue Room, from Sundance Selects via IFC Films, opens theatrically today, Friday, October 3 -- for Yom Kippur! -- in New York City at the IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinema and in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal. (The following Friday, October 10, it will open at Laemmle's Playhouse 7 and Town Center 5.)

Getting a jones for Preston Miller's JONES, an earlier film from the God's Land director; it's on FANDOR now -- for free!

Since God's Land was (and still is) my favorite film from last year -- this doesn't necessarily make it the "best" film, by the way, just my personal favorite because it went places and did things for me that no other movie accom-plished (my earlier review is here) -- I wanted to take a look at something else from its filmmaker, Preston Miller. Mr. Miller was kind enough to send me a DVD of his earlier movie JONES, which I finally got around to watching the morning. It's different enough in some ways, similar in others, to make Miller seem an even more interesting director and one worth keeping an eye on.

What the two films have most in common, I think, is Miller's interest in filming in real time (the filmmaker is shown at left). He edits a good deal less than do many other filmmakers, and while this made God's Land pretty lengthy (nearly three hours), Jones is surprisingly short -- just 76 minutes. The title refers to the title character (played oddly but indelibly by a Brooklynite from Texas named Trey Albright), and also -- perhaps not by intention but by the way art is created sub-consciously -- to both the Jones Mr. Jones has for many things Asian, and the Jones some of us viewers may get from watching Albright (below) in the altogether, full-frontal and (in one scene, at least, semi-erect.

The actor has a good body: muscular (but not "toned"), pale and freckled, and he uses it naturally and easily, whether clothed in a business suit (below: Jones is up in New York City on business, shooting a video for a legal deposition) or in nothing at all. Most odd is his non-business attire, as he strolls around Manhattan in what is clearly chilly weather, clad only in a jeans and a t-shirt, while everyone around him wears sweaters and/or jackets.

This creates an odd tension, setting Jones apart in yet one more manner, as he wanders the Big Apple,

drifting into a bar and engaging in conversation with a fellow (Bob Cabrini, above, right) who just might be a "made" man,

taking a subway to the end of its line,

and hiring a call girl (Amy Chiang, above, but below Jones).

The single really odd thing in the film is how we finally cannot hear all of Jones' dialog. We hear what the other person is saying, but sometimes (unless this was a glitch in the DVD*) we can't hear what actor Albright is saying, particularly in that bar scene. Whether this means that what he is saying is relatively unimportant, or maybe boring (the dialog is not what you would call slick) I don't know. I think this cutting-it-out, however, is somewhat misjudged, but as a stylistic "tic," it's no deal-breaker.

The sex scenes are quite realistic, so if this sort of thing disturbs you, be warned. They are not, however, unpleasant. They're just there, and every bit as natural as is Jones himself. Since the character, we have already learned, is happily married to a woman expecting his child, the question of why he is doing what he is doing does crop up.

Mid-sex, he suddenly seems to either lose his erection or have his attention wander. We learn why, in interesting fashion, at a later point in the film. But for now, as we know he craves Asian culture, I would say he is simply acting like men often act when on a business trip -- getting what they cannot get at home, adultery and Moses' commandment be damned. (Jones also engages with a young woman in the street -- photo at bottom -- who's having a problem with her new infant, and we see him react a bit haltingly to the prospect of being a father.)

Needing more of this special Asian hospitality, Jones craves a second night of pleasure but maybe wants to save money by going to the establishment itself (it's $200 a pop for the girl to come to him, but only $150 if he goes to her). This leads to the film's quiet climax, in which our hero gets a bit more (and less) than he bargained for.

Jones seems to me a nice precursor to Miller's later film: thoughtful, never less than interesting and very well-acted and directed. Made in 2005, it shows a filmmaker exploring and taking chances, both of which pay off here -- but even more beautifully and spectacularly in God's Land. You can savor Jones on Fandor now. In fact, the film site is offering a free 7-day pass, and if you log in with Facebook, you can watch the whole movie free. Might be a good way to get acquainted with Jones and with Fandor.
Or, you can purchase a Jones DVD here.

* It apparently was a DVD glitch. Preston Miller has informed me that the Jones character is indeed meant to be heard throughout the bar scenes, and that the DVD I obtained had somehow mis-fired. For those of you watching the film via Fandor, don't worry: Miller quickly went on Fandor to make sure that its copy was OK. It is.