Ends of the week are for easy movies.
Love&Dance (2006) directed by Eitan Anner features fragments of the life of Russian Jews living in the Israeli city of Ashdod. Most of them are conforming to the stereotypical life and representations of this community: alienated, longing for their life as it used to be, unrooted.
But there are their children too, making the best of a life at the margins of the society, running out of poverty and psychological abuse and complicated family contexts. In Love&Dance (original title in Hebrew is Sipur Hatzi-Russi) the focus is on a group of children preparing for a dance competition. They have dreams that are going beyond the peculiar life they share with their parents: they want to go out of country, maybe visit Tel Aviv too, as some never went out of their city. Dancing keep them busy, out of their small boxes of houses, away from the everyday family struggles they are forced to witness.
The film is played in pairs: from the children dancers to Chen´s parents and the tormented dance instructors - former world champions in Russia struggling with debts, alcohol abuse and failure in the new countries. The adults are lost in their unfilfilled potential and have-been feeling while the children assume, at least by taking their life seriously, the role of the adults.
Although the subject is easy and the representation is straight forward, lacking any complexity but only a level of everyday life realism, the actors - especially the children - do have a good play, who magnify and beautify the story.
I watched the movie on Amazon Prime, part of the basic monthly subscription. Love&Dance was also shown at the Moscow International Film Festival.
Rating: 3 stars
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