Self Made (2014) User Reviews

Unfocused, pretentious and silly

[grantss · 3/10 · 19 August 2016]

Michal is an avant garde artist and something of a celebrity in Israel. She is having a bad day, much of it amnesia-related: her husband unexpectedly flew overseas for a conference, her bed collapsed and the replacement appears faulty, interviewers keep unexpectedly appearing at her house (though they do have an appointment), her bath is filled with crabs. Meanwhile, in another part of town Nadine, a Palestinian woman, has just been fired, indirectly due to something Michal said. For Nadine, every day involves checkpoints, body searches and suspicion. Then their paths cross, and their lives are strangely altered.

Initially reasonably interesting and intriguing. There was a slow- burning tension about the movie which made you think the movie was going to be rather profound. There was no apparent focus though, which was a plus initially as I felt that once all the fragments coalesced, everything would be clear and have a point.

Things do come together, but not in a good way. After much pretentious wanderings and imagery, we have the crucial moment of the movie, when Michael and Nadine's paths cross. What happens after that is incredibly silly and far-fetched.

Clearly writer-director Shira Geffen wanted to make a political point, and her only way to get to her destination was to have an incredibly contrived, implausible plot. And the political point is hardly anything new either...

Not worth your time.

Nice work, but does break a rule here and there

[Nozz · 9/10 · 6 May 2015]

Shira Geffen was on TV explaining that although she knows it's customary to say what a film is about in a single sentence, she can't say clearly what this film of her own is about. But fools rush in, so I'll say that the gist is in what the protagonist, an artist, is heard saying about her own work: that it explores what happens when people confront the impossibility of undoing what they've done. In this particular case, a woman who can't live with what she's done breaks out of herself-- into amnesia, to begin with. Her adventures, absurd and occasionally amusing, are interleaved with those of an Arab counterpart. Naturally we expect them to cross paths, and they do; but some other narrative conventions are violated and we're left to wonder whether this is the way that Geffen's inspiration works or whether she is trying to pass off a failure to achieve proper narrative as a leap into higher art beyond it. The audience I was with seemed pleased by each episode but disappointed that the episodes didn't add up. Other than the plot, the backgrounds must be remarked on-- some strikingly peppered expanses of color and of grey, and some Beckettesque desert nothingness with a border-crossing in the middle like one of those free-standing doors in a Warner Brothers cartoon landscape. All in all, I found the movie pleasing and somewhat similar to Geffen's previous film (Jellyfish) although unhappier behind its flashes of wackiness.

Morose amnesiac best forgotten

[docmusimdb · 1/10 · 23 August 2014]

This collection of scenes was the opening night film at this year's Israeli Film Festival in Sydney. There were noisy protests by anti Israel protesters outside the cinema. Had they seen the movie, they would have welcomed it as an effective contribution to the Hamas war effort. I have ticked the IMDb "may contain spoilers" box as it is hard to know with a plot as bizarre as this one what key points should not be revealed. I am writing some details as that is the only way I can describe the boring absurdity of this film. The story opens with an Israeli woman in bed next to her husband when the bed collapses, causing her to bump her head and get a headache. Her husband then leaves for overseas on a business trip. The woman orders a new bed on the phone and we gather that she has concussion as she doesn't seem to know her own name. Later a man arrives stating that he is a chef whom she had ordered to cook crabs for herself and her husband at their place but first he must soften the crabs by playing them violin music. A German film crew comes to interview her and she starts to gather that she must be an avant garde artist of some sort. The newly ordered bed arrives and when she tries to assemble it she finds there are only 4 screws when there are supposed to be 5. She complains to the bed company. Meanwhile we have been introduced to an Arab woman who has to pass through a checkpoint to get to her job, which consists of packing screws for the bed company. She is portrayed as morose and simple minded. When she is asked about the missing screw in the packet she empties her pockets and a whole collection of screws fall out and she is fired. We see some aspects of her home life, the gist of which is that some male acquaintance is trying to recruit her as a suicide bomber. Meanwhile the miserable amnesiac Israeli woman gets angry with a woman trying to take a selfie with her at an art exhibition and after flushing the other woman's phone down the toilet locks herself in the bathroom. A guard threatens to break the door down but we don't see what happened. We next see her wandering dazedly along a tall concrete barrier wall on which are painted some yellow flowers. Meanwhile the Arab simple minded woman has passed through the checkpoint again, picking up someone else's baby on the way and after a scuffle involving two Arab men she is put in a holding pen by the Israeli soldiers. There she is joined by the Israeli woman who for no explicable reason takes her headscarf and puts it on. The Arab woman is then mistaken for the Israeli woman and taken to the Israeli woman's home. I haven't put in the right sequence other scenes involving the Israeli woman talking about having a hysterectomy as a form of performance art or scenes involving her husband's computer and its automatic reversion to pages of pornography, as it is hard to remember what came where in a whole movie that didn't make sense. I think Hedda Gabler covered the issue of miserable morose women doing nothing much fairly well and I really don't think making the morose women Arab and Israeli or amnesiac and simple minded adds very much to the genre. Nor does absurdism work very well when it is not funny. I spent most of the movie wondering if it was all supposed to be a dream by one of the characters but gave up wondering and gave up caring. One star for the Skype session with the naked porn star on the screen.

Hypersensitive Israeli and Palestinian women slip into each other's roles

[maurice_yacowar · 10/10 · 20 February 2021]

Israeli director Shira Geffen interweaves the alienation of two women, a famous Israeli avant-garde artist and a beleaguered Palestinian labourer. She initially connects them with a missing screw. The catatonic artist Michal loses one while trying to put together a new Ikea-style bed. After her raging complaint, Nadine is unjustly fired for apparently having failed to bag the correct number of screws. She drops screws on her path to help her find her way home. That's her prosaic version of Michal's exploratory installation, performance and video art. When the women cross paths- at a border stop, of course, where their cultures collide - they drift into each other's lives. Complicating that variation on the Prince and the Pauper story, the women look nothing like each other. Yet everyone accepts them in their new role. From that we can infer the general insensitivity to women's character, needs, desires, the failure either to sense or to accept individuation. Palestinian, Israeli - for women bearing the next generation of enemies the distinctions are irrelevant. So, too, Michal's husband - away on a tech conference - looks like the neighbour Nadine is having a furtive affair with. The Israeli soldier's lover in the last scene could be from either side. In one key shot the women meet on opposing escalators in the furniture store. But the shot has them moving sideways, laterally, denying the characters' vertical stratification. Neither moves to progress. Perhaps the film's key metaphor is the musical chef's note that crabs wear their skeletons on the outside. That's why he plays violin music to soften them for Michal's romantic anniversary dinner (that her husband will miss). Michal's exhibition is titled "Rolling the Insides Out." Her new Biennale piece features the womb she has had removed. The women's exchange of roles is heavily symbolic. Nadine continues Michal's catatonic remove from her interview with a German TV crew. When the German cameraman provokes her violence he exposes his own, gloating that the supposed Israeli peacenik is violent herself. Nadine's pregnancy turns functional the profusion of nursery furniture the store has dumped on Michal. Completing the switch, Michal is equipped with the suicidal bomb Nadine's aunt planned when she generously sent money to bring her. We don't know whether she will achieve that end or not. The fatal mission is at least delayed when Nadine's neighbour's younger son pauses to buy roses - for his mother. On the stone wall Michal passes her painting of large yellow flowers, the hopeful emblem of art reviving the hardened nature. At least the English title is tellingly ambiguous. The store deals in furniture their customers will put together - make - themselves. But as both women try to find coherence in their fragmented, numbing lives, they are fumblingly trying to find their own integrity, wholeness, being. This political drama is usually played out in films by the men. Warriors play their war. Ms Geffen instead opts for a richly, ambiguously poetic vision that disables precise literalism. Ir is as moving as it is evocative.