Warning: The movie I am about to write contains very aggressive and violent scenes. Pour les connoisseurs, a Parasite-like movie with an ending on repeat 15 minutes into the story. But this is where the comparisons with the multi-awarded Korean movie end.
Happy Times (Nitra´eh Besmachot, in Hebrew) by the LA-based Israeli film director Michael Meyer . available on Amazon Prime - starts like your average movie about Israelis abroad. A reunion of a mixture of real-estate, tech kind of guys with wives in charge with different committees at the children´s Chabad schools. They get together for the post-Shabbat meals. Usually it´s the Friday evening which really matters, and among the secular Israeli getting together for Havdalah isn´t really a thing, but this film wants to be very different from any movie with Israelis, me and you and many of us ever watched.
They look happy, that kind of happiness brought to you by an expensive villa with a pool, and some common memories from the Army and couple of businesses. The movie is split into scenes, each with a quote from some of the characters. This brings a lot of reason into what is going on: a massacre with each and every one of the participants to the feast gonna die. It starts with...actually does not matter how it starts and how it ends. Anger leads to hate which leads to more anger and even more violence. Until the end of the movie, everyone is a happy psychopat for whom everything can be used as a gun.
The kind Shtisel and one of the protagonists of another Israeli Netflix series When Heroes Fly - which is not bad at all either - Michael Aloni, plays a pretty good role, of just another psycho gathered around the table, a born rebel cousin who´s guilty for at least few of the victims (tip: all are dying in the end).
This mini-Israel is a stereotypical - but not necessarily untrue - reunion of characters we can easily encounter not only in the rich suburbs of LA: the hippy, the PTSD tech guy, the fornicator macho family father, the mixture of religious background for the very secular life, the racism against the Mizrahim and the blacks, the Chabad. And, seriously, even if you are in the middle of a massacre, don´t let your guest leave without packing fast a plate with some leftovers, after all you are a good Yiddishe mame no matter what.
The violence is never ending, gratuious and the ingenuity of the killing machines getting more and more creative from a victim to another. In the end, it should stop because no one is left. What cannot be stopped though is the running water from the clogget toilet.
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