Sunday, March 29, 2009

The Secrets (2007)

I've been meaning to blurb this, because I know I probably won't be able to write a full review.

I caught Avi Nesher's Ha-Sodot (The Secrets) the other week and found it to be a nice bindungsroman (boy I hate that the adjective "nice" has been demeaned) about first love, deciding who you are, and the ways in which a fundamentalist community can become so stifling that you have to pull away from it even though you think you can't.

It is (or would be) an easy enough film to mock. Just throw out all the current dismissive buzz phrases like "After School Special," "melodrama," or "provincial." But the fact is, I did care about these characters by the end of the film, not as poster children for some theological or political argument, but as human beings whom I wanted to see succeed and be happy whatever choices they made that might deviate from my own. In that sense, it would be a nice companion to Milk, which I thought more smooth but less heartfelt.

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