Amos Gitai the director, who has an affinity for architecture, opens the movie with an intriguing shot of a long corridor-- or balcony, actually, as it's open to the outside opposite its many doors. I guess it's what architects call a loggia. Anyway, in pleasantly surrealistic fashion, people come and speak and go. At one point, a man can be seen in the background playing a didgeridoo. A woman, who will turn out to be the main character, does a bit of pleasant dancing but feels troubled and uncertain, and the characters' random comings and goings and statements contribute to the feeling that nobody is really in control. The pacing and the sometimes aphoristic nature of the speeches keep the movie interesting even if nothing particular seems to be happening-- except that rhinoceroses may have been sighted and we know what that means. In Israel, Ionesco's famous play "Rhinoceros" left behind a verb that hasn't disappeared from the Hebrew language-- l'hitkarnef (that is, "to go rhino"), meaning to give up your better judgement and join a destructive political juggernaut.
Unless I'm off by a week or so, by the second week of its run at Cinema City, the major movie venue just north of Tel Aviv, this movie had been reduced to one showing a week. The third week too, there was only one showing, a matinee. I was the only viewer who turned up for it. And I rather liked the movie until I realized that the general surrealistic atmosphere of unpredictability and doubt was pierced by a virulent political message - that Israel is a country where foreigners arrived and mercilessly dispossessed the proper residents. In perhaps the most offensive sequence, apparently filmed at the Yiddish book depository in Tel Aviv's central bus station, actress Hana Laszlo plays a character who reads with loving nostalgia from a book about the terrible conditions of a concentration camp. In real life, Laszlo's own mother survived Auschwitz! Did Laszlo know what she was doing in this movie, implying that the Jews are happy to embrace the camps as part of their past in order to legitimize their sins against others? It turns out that the rhinos of this movie, the people who have given up trying to resist the evil of the prevailing politics, are those who believe in the legitimacy of how the State of Israel was founded. Considering that in Ionesco's original play, the rhinos were an obvious metaphor for Nazi sympathizers, Gitai has, in my opinion, crossed a line here.
In the best remembered American production of "Rhinoceros," it was Zero Mostel who could be seen beginning to go rhino before the eyes of the audience. In this movie, it's Irene Jacob, and she doesn't have a rubber face to work with like Mostel's but she has some flexibility in her body and if Zero Mostel is a ten, then Irene Jacob is maybe a respectable seven. It's a shame that the movie is poisoned by a one-sided, wrong-headed political slant, as if Gitai himself had gone rhino.
Unless I'm off by a week or so, by the second week of its run at Cinema City, the major movie venue just north of Tel Aviv, this movie had been reduced to one showing a week. The third week too, there was only one showing, a matinee. I was the only viewer who turned up for it. And I rather liked the movie until I realized that the general surrealistic atmosphere of unpredictability and doubt was pierced by a virulent political message - that Israel is a country where foreigners arrived and mercilessly dispossessed the proper residents. In perhaps the most offensive sequence, apparently filmed at the Yiddish book depository in Tel Aviv's central bus station, actress Hana Laszlo plays a character who reads with loving nostalgia from a book about the terrible conditions of a concentration camp. In real life, Laszlo's own mother survived Auschwitz! Did Laszlo know what she was doing in this movie, implying that the Jews are happy to embrace the camps as part of their past in order to legitimize their sins against others? It turns out that the rhinos of this movie, the people who have given up trying to resist the evil of the prevailing politics, are those who believe in the legitimacy of how the State of Israel was founded. Considering that in Ionesco's original play, the rhinos were an obvious metaphor for Nazi sympathizers, Gitai has, in my opinion, crossed a line here.
In the best remembered American production of "Rhinoceros," it was Zero Mostel who could be seen beginning to go rhino before the eyes of the audience. In this movie, it's Irene Jacob, and she doesn't have a rubber face to work with like Mostel's but she has some flexibility in her body and if Zero Mostel is a ten, then Irene Jacob is maybe a respectable seven. It's a shame that the movie is poisoned by a one-sided, wrong-headed political slant, as if Gitai himself had gone rhino.