Tom Nesher directs with tears in his eyes

In May I was asked if I had seen Tom Nesher’s film “Close to Me”, and I answered “No, but I bet he will win the Ophir Award”. Yesterday he did win the award for best film. How did I know four months ago that this would happen even before the names of the candidates were published? It’s easy: four of the last five Ophir-winning films were directed by female directors. Three of them were debut films. So a director’s debut film? The statistics were unequivocal. The Academy’s 1,000 members have a predictable voting pattern, making the competition predictable.

Once you identify a permanent bias in one direction in a competition, it’s time to refresh it because it becomes unfair. Not only is it unfair to the other participants in the competition, but it is also unfair to the winners, since the question immediately arises: did they really choose my film because they liked it? Because he is the best? Or because it suited a certain agenda? Or maybe because they think the film is the most suitable for contending for the Oscar?

So to remove doubt from the skeptics: “Close to Me” is an excellent film. An excellent film in an excellent cinematic year, which placed next to it “Milk” and “The Ruler Road”, two films that I was delighted with, and “Girls like us”, a film that caught me by complete surprise and which I loved very much. “Close to me” and “Girls like us” did sweep most of the Ophir awards yesterday.

“Close to Me” tells the story of a young woman named Eden (Lia Elloff, who won the Ophir Award for her role as Nesher’s alter ego), who is connected in an almost symbiotic relationship with her younger brother Nati (Ido Tako). When he is killed in a car accident, she discovers that he had a partner named Maya who he hid from her, and that each of them saw a completely different side of him. Aden now transfers the desperate dependence she had on her brother to her almost compulsive relationship with Maya (Daria Rosen), and both try to fill the void of the loss through this friendship.

This synopsis, plus the name of Tom Nesher (daughter of director Avi Nesher), who indeed lost her younger brother, the late Ari, in a chilling hit-and-run accident in 2018, may indicate that the film contains emotional, if not plot, autobiographical elements. But there is a fascinating element in this film that was already recognizable in Nesher’s previous work: about ten years ago I saw the final film directed by Nesher at Thelma Yellin High School, “Albie and Alma”. Joy Rieger and Gefen Barkai played there two friends in heart and soul, who spend all the time together .They are apparently brave and permissive and when they go out they are looking for sexual adventures, but they are actually frightened and completely dependent on each other. Albi is gay and the way he directed them, they were presented as two halves of the same person, Albi – the soul .It was not just an exercise in acting and directing, but embodied a visual thought for a Platonic idea, of two characters who are halves of one person, perhaps the creator herself.

And here in her first feature film, and even though the story’s generative event is related to an event that really happened, Nesher actually continues to explore the yin and yang of the soul that creates two characters that are connected by tragedy, but one cannot help but wonder if one is actually a figment of the other’s imagination, the complementary side of her that she is not Can live without it, or its destructive side, the one that needs to be gotten rid of.

Eden, the one with the heavenly name, is a floating, dangerous girl who is constantly on the run. Maya, younger than her, shorter than her, is the balanced, quiet, calculated, and maybe even frightened side. And suddenly it becomes clear to Eden that her brother may have loved the one who is the most different from her. This is probably the biggest tragedy she has to face in this year of mourning, for a brother she probably didn’t even know.

The 27-year-old Nesher, who this week became the youngest Ophir Award-winning director (a record previously held by Shavi Gavizon, who was 30 years old when he directed Shuro, the first film to win the Academy Award), does something extremely difficult in her debut film: she A young woman who manages to direct a film that is all about youth. Obviously: easy writing is easy. Filming, directing, acting and then saving it in editing and music as well, it’s hard. That is why many Israeli films by young creators are born old. It takes a lot of time to make them and along the way they lose their freshness. But “Close to Me” – for weeks there has been a buzz around it specifically among young women already filling its pre-debut screenings, a buzz I don’t remember like since “Zero in Human Relations” – manages to look and sound like a portrait of a generation. It’s a film with a phenomenal playlist, with a great use of music, and with a camera that seems to move on speedos, trying to catch up with the pace and dynamism of its heroes.

Let’s take the opening scene: the first few minutes are like a horror movie against a known and inevitable death (there are some moments in the movie that could have been developed in the direction of a horror movie, and at times I regretted not). The movie starts with a musical jumble in a playlist, say on Spotify. Someone impatient goes through the songs and can’t find anything to listen to. Everything is already trite for him. This is Nati and he lives like his sister and their mutual friends – a fast, reckless, dangerous life, moving quickly on the bike, not looking left or right, every moment is almost certain death.

Nesher as the daughter of Avi Nesher will clean cinema from the day she learned to walk and grew up on movie sets. One must wonder what the daughter took from her father. But first, if you look at the whole of her work, you have to honestly ask: where was he influenced by her? Because he got to know Joy Rieger, who in 2016 became a regular actress in Nesher’s last films, thanks to his daughter’s final film. And the daughter must have noticed that the father makes frequent script use of two female characters who are like opposites of each other: Liraz Charki and Neta Gerti in “The End of the World to the Left” (20 years later, Gerti plays the heroine’s mother in “Close to Me” ), Michal Stemler and Anya Bukstein in “The Secrets”, Joy Rieger and Nellie Tager in “The Sins”, Rieger and Abigail Harari in “Another Story”. But if you see some inspiration for the father and daughter films, it actually comes from “Dizengoff 99”: the use of music, the Tel Aviv locations – “Close to me” is one of the films that turn Tel Aviv from south to north into a beautiful cinema set – the preoccupation with youth, love , desire, sex (and also the use of the name Nati, the character played by Gidi Gov in “Dizengoff”, and the dead brother in “Krob Eli”). But while the heroes of “Dizengoff” in 1979 wondered what they would work for and what they would earn a living from, the heroines of “Close to Me” are not concerned with the question of what to live for, but how to live and whether at all.

But the truth is that when you see “Close to me”, the filmography of Father Eagle is not the one that comes to mind first. Because Nesher designs in her film a young woman who lives in the reality of a party. It seems that the lighting of the clubs accompanies the heroine everywhere (except in meetings with her parents). Something about the loose and sent photography and the neon lighting, the glitter and ultraviolet lamps gives the feeling that Nesher draws inspiration from the directors Harmony Korine and Sofia Coppola, also a daughter and a bereaved sister, who makes films about a woman’s search for a realistic anchor (“Bling Ring”, for example). Earlier this year, Nesher won first prize in one of the Tribeca Festival’s frameworks, and it’s easy to see how her film communicates with the world cinema scene, because she immediately places herself confidently among the directors of the debut films “How to Have Sex” and “After the Sun”, films about sad women who are lost at happy parties.

“Close to me” is an impressive debut film. As such, his imperfection intensifies his strong moments. It has scenes and characters that could easily have been discarded – for example, the story of the parents’ divorce, which is useful from a script point of view and explains the bond between the brothers but detracts from the film. And in front of them are some simply phenomenal scenes, for Pantheon. For example, one that takes place in a split screen between a night club and a high school trip to Auschwitz with a techno remix of the song “Walking to Caesarea” (Eli, Eli by Hana Senesh). This is what the film is about, about the split between life and death, libido and tragedy, a joy of life that hides depression in a film about a heroine who dances with tears in her eyes. It’s a movie that, against all logic, only gets better as it goes on, until an unforgettable ending. By the end of the movie, cynic as I may be, my face was wet too.

The winners of the Ophir Prize, 2024

Best Film: “Close to Me”

Best director: Tom Nesher, “Close to me”

Best leading actress: Lia Elloff, “Closer to Me”

Best Supporting Actress: Bat Al Mosari, “Girls Like Us”

Best Screenplay: Maya Koenig, “Milk”

Best Supporting Actor: Yaakov Zeda-Daniel, “Girls Like Us”

Best cinematography: Saar Mizrahi, “Total Show”

Best Short Feature Film: “The Boy”

The documentary over 60 minutes: “Grandma’s acre”