New film ‘Aliyah’ an uninsightful missed opportunity

It’s hard to know what to make of “Aliyah,” a misguided but harmless French drama that opened Friday in New York. The movie focuses on Jewish immigration to Israel (“aliya” in Hebrew connotes settling in the Holy Land) — in this case by a small-time drug dealer from a dysfunctional family in Paris.

The debut feature of director Elie Wajeman, “Aliyah” tells the story of Alex, an aimless 27-year-old with a dead mother, distant father and parasitic older brother, the last of whom can be relied upon only to pop up occasionally to ask for money. When a cousin returns briefly from Israel, where he’s just completed his army service, Alex (Pio Marmai) asks if he can join the visitor’s next venture — opening a restaurant in Tel Aviv.

Like much else about the character — and the movie as a whole — the reasons for Alex’s decision remain vague, seemingly a mix of opportunism and a desire to escape his dreary surroundings. The cousin agrees to give Alex a place in the business, as long as he raises a certain amount of money and makes aliya. With the offer in place, the character sets about learning Hebrew — from a pretty ex (Sarah Le Picard) — and filling out the necessary paperwork.

The requisite complications come in the form of a non-Jewish love interest (Adele Haenel) and an act of betrayal by the cash-hungry older brother (Cedric Kahn), who leaves Alex no choice — at least in his own mind — but to complete one last score (cliché alert) with a fellow drug dealer.

“Aliyah” screened out of competition at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and in principle could have made for an insightful, compelling movie. But Wajeman — who also wrote the script — has made some head-scratching choices, stripping his subject of everything that makes it potentially memorable and distinctive.

In an e-mail to the Times of Israel, Wajeman wrote that the film was inspired by an Israeli-born friend in Paris, a drug dealer who said he felt a “call” to return to his homeland. During a subsequent visit to Israel, the 32-year-old director met “a guy in a club” who reported immigrating “just for adventure” — not, he emphasized — out of Zionism or Jewish conviction.

That’s all perfectly reasonable — people end up in Israel for lots of reasons, from the ideological to the purely economic. Like every other group, Jews have their share of drug dealers, and Jewish criminals do occasionally try to flee law enforcement by moving to Israel.

But while Wajeman is free to create any type of character he wants, the movie makes the odd choice of looking past all the other, far more common reasons people make aliya (with the exception of some brief, perfunctory passages meant to underscore Alex’s lack of religious identification).

For a recent French movie, the omission is perplexing — the country’s Jews have some very specific, regrettable reasons for leaving in significant numbers in the past decade, including the gruesome 2006 torture and murder of Ilan Halimi, and last year’s deadly shooting at a Jewish school in Toulouse. Many French Jews say they feel vulnerable merely being identified as such; the country’s historical antagonism toward Israel also goes strangely unmentioned.

In other cases, such evasions could be read as a form of denial, but nothing so sinister is going on in “Aliyah” — the Jewish Wajeman has simply made the mistake of trying to broaden his audience by eliminating all the real-world specifics — history, anti-Semitism, minority status — that would give his story meaning, a specific point of reference. (“I’m interested in feelings, not in the [Jewish] community,” he says in the movie’s press notes.)

As a result, “Aliyah” is simply a generic, mediocre story about a troubled young man trying to make a fresh start. Like the plot, the characters are schematic rather than realistic. Despite acting that’s better than the script deserves, their motivations remain as opaque as Alex’s decision to move to Israel rather than, say, Fiji or Ireland. Why is Alex attracted to his new girlfriend, or vice versa? The movie doesn‘t say.

“I am not a specialist in Judaism,” Wajeman says in the film’s press notes. “I barely know Israel.”

Fair enough. But wouldn’t it have made sense to learn something before making a movie called “Aliyah”?