MOVIE REVIEW

The concept of fate gets deftly explored in Savi Gabizon's film.

By Kevin Thomas, Times Staff Writer

Savi Gabizon's "Nina's Tragedies" begins with a discovery: a journal covering an especially hectic six-month period in the life of a bright, nerdy Tel Aviv 14-year-old, Nadav (Aviv Elkabets). It has been found by his principal, who immediately summons his dying father, Amnon (Shmil Ben-Ari), to her office because of its sexual candor, which includes the boy fantasizing the consummation of his crush on his beautiful Aunt Nina (Ayelet July Zurer), his mother's younger sister. Nadav and his journal thereby provide the film with its point of view, which allows the viewer to rediscover the world through youthful yet acutely perceptive eyes.

This point of view provides a framework for Gabizon's unique vision in which Nadav and then his father, through his son's journal, discover the tragicomic absurdities that make up so much of life. This approach enables Gabizon to create a unique tone in which everything seems to be in a continual collision course — emotion and fate, life and death, joy and sorrow. The film constantly shifts between being funny — frequently outright hilarious — and sad while from time to time becoming both simultaneously. "Nina's Tragedies" has a quicksilver quality that enables it to emerge as that rarest of movies — one that seems to be authentically original.

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Nadav's mother, Alona (Anat Waxsman), a high-strung fashion designer, and his deeply religious father split up, and Nadav resents his father for his neglect after the separation. But Nadav is staying with his father now that Amnon is dying from some form of fast-spreading malignancy. There is a chance for a father-and-son reconciliation, but at the same time Nadav is understandably deeply upset when his beloved Nina abruptly decides to marry Haimon (Yoram Hatav), her longtime beau with whom she has had a notably tempestuous relationship. But marriage settles the couple down, and Nadav, like his mother, discovers how likable Haimon can be. But Haimon is killed by a terrorist bomb, and Alona sends Nadav to live temporarily with the distraught Nina, who is deeply fond of her nephew.

Although he feels badly over Haimon's fate, Nadav is overcome with joy at the prospect of being so close to the object of his devotion. But then Nina meets Avinoam (Alon Aboutboul), a hunky photographer whose "I-feel-your-pain" empathy would be laughable were it not so clearly sincere. But this is just the beginning of the complications Nadav is learning to observe, and they involve a convoluted subplot that drives home just how perverse the workings of fate can really be. "Nina's Tragedies" allows viewers to grasp all of this and more. The chimerical, constant shifting of tone that is so fundamental to "Nina's Tragedies" demands an effortless nimbleness on the part of its cast, which comes through admirably as an ensemble.

"Nina's Tragedies" has too much depth, too much freshness and imagination ever to be adequately described in any of its aspects as merely "quirky" or "off the wall." Gabizon has peered beneath the surface of human behavior to marvel in all its contradictions and has managed no less than to encompass with warmth and humor a full spectrum of human experience and encapsulate it in 110 fast-moving minutes.

"Nina's Tragedies" is further evidence that the Israeli cinema is at last coming fully of age — cinema not divorced from its country's tumultuous past and present but no longer strongly beholden to it so that intensely personal and highly idiosyncratic films like "Nina's Tragedies" can come to life. It most clearly takes place in Israel in the here and now, but it is meant as a compliment to say that it could take place almost anywhere.

*

'Nina's Tragedies'

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Some sexuality, language, mature themes

Ayelet July Zurer...Nina

Aviv Elkabets...Nadav

Yoram Hatav...Haimon

Shmil Ben-Ari...Amnon

Anat Waxsman...Alona

Alon Aboutboul...Avinoam

Dov Navon...Menahem

A Wellspring release of an Anat Assoulin presentation of an A.A. production. Writer-director Savi Gabizon. Producers Anat Assoulin, Gabizon. Cinematographer David Gurfinkel. Editor Tali Halter Shanker. Music Assaf Amdurky. Costumes Tsipi Englisher. Production designer Shahar Bar-Adon. In Hebrew, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 50 minutes.

At selected theaters.