NYFF COVERAGE – Keren Yedaya’s feature film debut, Or (also known as My Treasure) is an unsparing portrayal of prostitution in Israel. Ruthie is an aging, ailing prostitute whose days of working are numbered, and Or her teenage daughter who works laboriously to attempt to keep her mother off the streets. Administering medicine to her mother, picking her up from the hospital, finding her a respectable job as a cleaning lady, Or patiently cares for her mother while trying to find and maintain a more normal life herself.
At first, the film sets up an ambiguous comparison between Ruthie’s occupation and Or’s random sexual encounters with boys she meets on the street. But once the mother of Or’s boyfriend Ido voices her objections to her son’s relationship with Or, any moral distinction between Ruthie’s and Or’s sexual habits is effectively dissolved as Or begins a seemingly inevitable progression into her mother’s line of work.
Perhaps the film’s principal weakness is its assumption that this turn of events is unavoidable—not simply because it makes for a grim movie, but because it provides no discernible motivations for this downward spiral. Similarly, Ruthie’s apparent addiction to her job goes largely unquestioned. It is possible that both women feel incapable of subsisting in their environment without playing into the male-dominated world of sexual relations, or they find the devotion of their impossibly sympathetic boyfriends insufficient to their needs.
In this respect, the film remains outside of its characters, even as it portrays their banal and unpleasant surface actions (dishwashing, fucking) without flinching at the details. Particularly in its final shot (a somewhat predictable quotation from The 400 Blows), Or observes a moral and psychological distance form its characters that is maddeningly, heartbreakingly irresolute.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Transfax Films 35mm print
06 Oct 2004 3:14 PM | Submit Comment
