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By KEN EISNER One of the smartest, most purely enjoyable
Israeli pics in years, "Giraffes" has fun with the
self-referencing, meta-cinema concept but never makes too big a deal out of
it. By turns sexy, farcical and mysterious, pic boasts a polished look and a
very appealing cast in a tale that can travel more easily than most Middle
Eastern fare. "The world is basically arbitrary," drones the voice on a self-help tape as a man jumps out of his car, pulls a gun, and chases a short-haired young woman through an orange grove, into an abandoned building, and seemingly to her death from an unexpected fall. The rest of the well-used running time is spent unraveling what went before, although enough oddball elements enter into the flashbacks to make viewers wonder if they're getting the straight stuff. The gal on the run apparently is Efrat, a stunning but lonely
secretary played by pixie-like newcomer Meital Dohan, who looks like a tough
Audrey Tautou. Indeed, the "Amelie" comparison gets underlined when
Efrat passes herself off as a French tourist to an old woman (Elisheva
Michaeli) who takes her in when she gets in trouble. That trouble starts when Efrat misses her ride with a blind date
named Avner (Micha Selektar). Avner mistakenly hooks up with Dafna (Liat
Glick), a part-time actress who lives in the same Tel Aviv building and was
waiting for a lift to her night shoot. Abigail (Tinkerbell), another gal from
the house, gets that ride, on a whim, and ends up stealing Dafna's part. After missing her date, Efrat, wearing the necklace of giraffes
that will later incriminate her, ends up going for beers with a friendly cab
driver -- an unfortunate turn when he pulls her into some shenanigans that
leave her with a dead cabby and a bag full of money. She goes on the lam, and
eventually contacts the sympathetic Abigail to help her find a lawyer -- a
sawbones who happens to be Avner. As plot complications continue to pile up, the first clue that
everything shouldn't be taken at face value comes when it's revealed that
Abigail's a magazine journalist; in fact, she's writing up everything she
learns about Efrat's case. By the time helmer-scripter Tzahi Grad starts
intercutting her on-page conjectures with "real" flashbacks,
viewers have been warned to be suspicious. When it turns out that Abby's
using her new show-biz connections to pitch the caper as a movie concept, the
whole story begins to unravel, albeit in a way that's more amusing than
arbitrary. En route, there's a lot of witty dialogue and compelling biplay
between uniformly attractive cast. Lead Dohan's scenes with old-timer
Michaeli, as the brusque landlady who becomes a surrogate mother to the troubled
heroine, add soulful counterpoint to the eros and satire that otherwise
predominates. All tech aspects are
sharp, although synth-heavy music sounds just a tad on the cheap side. © Copyright 2003, Reed Business Information,
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