ISRAELI FILM FESTIVAL: The plot of 2 Night has its two unnamed protagonists search late night Tel Aviv for a parking space. The pair – Yaron Brovinsky plays the guy and Keren Berger is the girl – have just met in a bar. They plan to have sex (or else that impulse is the air at least). But they first need to park the car before they can climb into bed.
2 Night, then, is like a travel movie; you know the kind where strangers meet on a train, or a bus, or in the street, and they spend time getting to know one another. 2 Night has been compared to Before Sunrise. It’s a convenient analogy that’s a bit misleading since Linklater’s film has a romantic glow from the get-go. This movie seems more like an actor’s showpiece and filmmaker being clever about production and style and budget; it’s harsher in mood, and definitely earthbound, and even the look seems a deliberate counterpoint to optimistic outcomes.
It’s shot in a sickly yellow hue and it’s not especially romantic for much of its screen time (though sentiment grows). Set over a few hours, we hardly even leave the hero vehicle, and when we do, we aren’t treated to a beautified landscape, but a dark, over-crowded city, lit by ugly neon.
At first, 2 Night seems to be a movie about what men want from women and women want from men in terms of life and relationships. It’s certainly not a movie about sex; if this pair really wanted it they could, as couples the world over have since time began, and would have, found a place and a way.
Still, director Roi Werner and co. seem to want to make a movie in the tradition of poignant close encounters; the twist here is that getting to know someone can be as exciting as you know, um, doing it. Apparently the lack of convenient parking in Tel Aviv is a blight on the city and something of a serious bit of urban mismanagement, so I suppose the premise is an in-joke. That’s one way of reading it; another is that Werner has contrived a situation where the protagonists are 'trapped’ as it were and the only thing they can do is talk. And boy, this pair can yak. They talk about a lot of stuff that reveals their prejudices, their hang-ups and fears"¦ and at other times their conversation seems to feed the current vogue for cultural discourse on fashionable themes. (Tattoos and porn get a going over here, in a particularly unconvincing bit of blather reminiscent of witless net blogging at its thought-free brain-by-pass worst.)
At times I felt the dead hand of a writer desperately trying to squeeze something significant out of all this banal talk; as in trying to 'say something’ about men and women and the awkward rituals of dating, the yearning for sexual contact, and the fear of emotional involvement"¦ Of course there’s little wrong with that ambition, it’s just I got the feeling that the words seem so well, written, as opposed to arising from spontaneous human interaction. The lines don’t feel like thoughts at times, but intricate and prepared coded messages.
The film’s best moments are when the characters reveal themselves under the force of circumstance; I really liked Berger’s fits of impulse and bad temper and the way Brovinsky’s passive aggressive nature is slowly revealed as their mutual frustrations build. (We learn that he’s displacing guilt too, but any more on this bit of plot would be a spoiler.)
For all its irritations, its sly pretensions and glib insights, it’s got a spell that’s finally winning. It’s like someone you meet and dislike immediately; only after spending a bit of time with them do you end feeling a lot of affection. A big part of its charm derives from the leads; they’re energetic, quite funny and rather sweet. In the end, the film transcends its tricks and gimmicks and a rather facile intellect to reveal a tenderness that’s more profound than any phony philosophising. You want to see this pair in a happy ending because deep down you feel that’s somehow just as it should be, because they’ve taken the time to be honest and true with each other.
