DVD Youth

I saw this in a film festival recently, and for a directorial debut thought it was a good thriller with assertive direction and a tense plot.

However – you cannot help but be annoyed and marvelled at all times by the sheer stupidity shown by the two protagonists; it is realistic at times and at other times not. A certain and highly implausible scene on a bus early in the film nearly ruined that sense of realism for me, but otherwise the movie kept everything pretty real in the sense that the two brothers are merely amateurs and hadn't planned things properly. Performances are good, but due to the nature of the story it is difficult to have any empathy with the characters, and you cant but help to chuckle and be relieved over their shortcomings.

There is some sense of social critique under it all, but (un)fortunately this is never delved too much into in order to fully justify their actions; the director has been less interested in motivations and character background, more interested in minute details of the crime and the act of kidnapping someone, leaving us pondering over the why's until the very end.

I have spent the past weekend in London as part of a film society trip to see a film from the BFI London Film Festival. We could choose a film from three choices, all in the first feature section and my choice was Youth, an Israel-Germany joint production by Israeli director Tom Shoval that takes a look at two brothers who attempt to aid their struggling family through criminal ways: kidnapping a young girl.

The film is quite uncomfortable at times, but even in its most violent moments it is difficult to feel a real hatred towards the two main characters, largely down to their development as real human beings in a real struggling family. The actors are actually both identical twins in real life, and both give fantastic performances in the film. The for most the time incompetent when it comes to kidnapping, and do not have a clue what to do to help their family, they feel like they are being kept away from the dark reality of the world by their parents and simply want to help.

It is a very powerful film, and like I said, it feels very real. Eitan and David Cunio are the stars, but the other actors involved are also very good, such as the kidnapped young girl played by Gita Amely. The film poses many moral questions and takes a true look at relationships between brothers and family as a whole, and some Israeli people watching it also commented on its accuracy in portraying the country's situation.

What was even better was the fact that the director was at the screening and after it had finished he talked about the film and took questions from the audience. This was really interesting an made the viewing a whole lot better, it explained a lot of things and made it feel more personal and put certain scenes into better perspective.

He had a lot of interesting things to say, one of the things he said was he auditioned loads of random sets of brothers for the main roles and when he eventually decided on these two he wanted to test them out more as the had never acted before, so he asked them to steal something from a supermarket together (which all other parties in on the test) and he was surprised when they were stopped that they never revealed they had been told to do it, not your usual audition for a role.

Another interesting point he mentioned was in regards to one scene where the two brothers take the kidnapped girl on board a bus, one of the brothers is fully dressed in military uniform with a gun on his lap pointing towards the girl, and the girl has bandages covering her eyes with sunglasses on top. He explained how although to us viewers it might seem unrealistic he actually did the scene without filming as a test on a real bus to see how people would react, and nobody did anything, in fact people felt a lot safer with military people on board. Part of the film is about how the characters themselves feel like, or try to be superheroes, with lots of direct references to some modern American action films with t-shirts worn by the characters. There are quite a lot of funny scenes in the film too, some intentional, some maybe not, but in many of even the most uncomfortable scenes we are able to laugh at some of the actions of the brothers.