The movie stars Irit Sheleg as a joyless supermarket cashier who gets sucked into her coworker’s (Regina Spector’s) sexual life.
Tropicana, a new Israeli film that opened on Thursday, is well made but relentlessly bleak.
The movie opens at a supermarket in a small town in the south of Israel at night. A mortally wounded cashier drags herself across the floor, leaving a trail of blood. It might seem that the movie is going to be a slasher film, or a Hitchcock-style thriller, but the story shifts to Orly (Irit Sheleg), another cashier at the store. It turns out that the murder victim was Sigal (Regina Spector), the head cashier, and Orly sees in her colleague’s death opportunity as well as tragedy. She talks herself up to the manager, angling for a promotion, and at moments, Tropicana seems a little like the TV series Checkout – without any of the laughs.
A promotion would be a rare bit of good news in Orly’s joyless life. She cares for her toxic, ailing mother (Rivka Bahar), and her obese son (Michael Levy), and has little connection with her husband (Dover Koshashvili). But while becoming head cashier wouldn’t hurt, it seems it would do little to change her grim reality.
A PAST Jerusalem Film Festival. (credit: ITAMAR GINSBURG/JERUSALEM CINEMATEQUE)
What is ‘Tropicana’ about?
The story starts to move when she finds Sigal’s phone and answers it when it rings, which puts her in contact with some kind of swingers’ club. Orly begins going to the assignations meant for Sigal, in search of human connection as much as sex, it seems. These encounters include an extended one with a double-amputee who lives with his mother. It wasn’t clear to me how to take this whole sequence. The wheelchair-bound man and his mother seem sympathetic, and perhaps the sex is meant to be cathartic for Orly, but she seems so blank that it’s hard to understand what it means to her, if anything.
Tropicana has drawn comparisons to the cinema of Austrian director Ulrich Seidl, known for his depictions of the dark side of human nature. But his movies have a certain irony and wildness that wasn’t on display here; the film is so slow-paced that it seemed longer than its 82-minute running time.
Tobi has directed several music videos, and the images in the film are beautifully composed. In the director’s note in the press kit for the film, he writes, “Set in the worn landscape of the South, the film raises questions about intra-family sexual repression, the transmission of intergenerational shame, and the possibility of breaking the cycle of repression held in place by the matriarchy of the home. The film moves between everyday realism and a dreamlike dimension, demanding devotion to the abstraction it offers.” If that intrigues you, then by all means see it.
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