AICE Israeli Film Festival: Twenty-something Weinblum (Ofer Shechter) lives in a 'prison’ of his own making. He has TV, porn, a large and messy apartment and a cat. Four years before the action of the movie starts he was a computer programmer; he had actual sex (as opposed to the virtual kind) and a social life and he even enjoyed the outdoors. But then he had an anxiety attack that completely demolished any semblance of 'normal’ life. As the movie opens, Weinblum is set up as the master of his own universe; he is a perverse character, a wilful and happy agoraphobe with no time on his hands.
The drama of the movie is about how Weinblum’s rigid routine gets thrown out of whack when he lets the outside world get inside his personal space. Perhaps he has always known a sad human truth that most of realise as kids; people often need us more than we need them.
This interesting Israeli feature is the directing debut of two brothers, Yoav and Doron Paz, who apparently have a background in commercials and music clips. They’ve given the movie an intriguing look that re-calls, if anything, the visual ambience of a fish-tank. Weinblum’s cluttered rented apartment is a murky space where neon windows of light pock mark the dark.
It’s not a particularly flashy film; in fact it seems rather restrained. What technique there is appears tuned to accent Weinblum’s keen sensory awareness; punchy editing and a sound design that heightens even the smallest knock. Its essential elements are spare. With only one key set, a handful of characters, and a central protagonist who spends most of his time looking and thinking, the challenge for the Paz brothers seems to have been to keep the movie from falling dead from a kind of dramatic inertia.
Part of what gives the movie its spark is Weinblum’s wall-to-wall voice-over narration. Delivered in an ironic, 'I should have seen it all coming’ tone of resignation tinged with a strain of regret, it’s actually one of the highlights of the movie (especially since it’s less a commentary on anything we see and hear and more another layer to Weinblum’s deceptively dead-pan character).
Weinblum has two figures in his life; and both, in a sense want a big 'piece’ of him. There is Daniela (Efrat Baumwald), a market researcher who practically throws herself at Weinblum. And there’s Lepicher (Shlomo Bar-Shavit), the real estate agent who wants to throw him out of the apartment, in order to flog it off.
Much of the second half of the film is dedicated to Weinblum assembling a 'fortification’ against this twin-assault on his personal space. With Daniela he’s passive aggressive, and when Lepicher, who he calls 'Grumps’, brings some potential young home buyers to his flat, Weinblum turns weird, nasty and sarcastic.
As written by Isher Har Lev (from his novel) and the Paz brothers, the movie is a sentiment free-zone and spiked with some fine black humour. (Lepicher is a Holocaust survivor who survived the war in a hole; at one point he disses famed Jewish icon Anne Frank!)
Still, the film seems less interesting as it goes on. Perhaps this is because Weinblum seems oblivious to the human insights we understand or can derive from his dilemma. Or, perhaps it’s the way the Paz brothers construct him as a 'hero’. (Strangely we start rooting for him to 'win’ out in his no-win situation.) The movie ends on a thoroughly ambiguous note that allows the possibility that Weinblum could indeed step back into the real world, but this doesn’t quite have the charm of a life-affirming statement since he seems so oblivious to feelings – his own and everyone else’s.
Some reviewers have read this movie in strict allegorical terms, seeing it as either a deadpan satire on media dependency or else some kind of political critique to do with Israeli’s position in geo-politics. Frankly, there’s not a whole lot of evidence to support either claim. More convincing is the notion that Phobidilia is an exercise in good old fashioned 20th century existential dread, updated with the accoutrements of the digital age. Weinblum is a self-satisfied isolate and, the way the movie tells imagines it, he’s not really missing out on anything.
