Disengagement

too much french, could not understand movie

I love Juliett Binoche and the true story was informative. However, I was not that crazy about it.....

Despite Binoche,a big flop.

When the film ended I truly felt disassociated and a bit confused. Not because the film failed in some way, because it succeeded so well.This story deals with disengagement.1. To release from something that holds fast, connects, or entangles.2. To release (oneself) from an engagement, pledge, or obligationor the act of releasing from an attachment or connectionStarting this film there is a woman, Ana, who is played beautifully by Binoche, who disengages....on many levels.... from her father (who has died) , from a past, from overwhelming guilt, from one identity to understand herself in another. What she "realizes" within this film's spaces about her personal identity is amazing. She "loses" I think to what is within the hug she gives to her daughter she meets now in near in adulthood, in a scene really free of word. The daughter she relocates (her father has known the child she "gave up" years before and after his death she goes to her to deliver her inheritance and this news) and finds her then in such turmoil and politic mess it can hardly be contained by my describing or within the film it is fraught with confusion-- with fear, hints at terror, like an inner landscape one might dream for such a thing.Disengaged fits, too for her, from a persona she's held strongly and we watch that being shed or faced....we enter into the wider world, specifically an Israeli, Palestinian world in enormous transition, flux, oh where to begin.The story tells a woman's journey after the death of her father, into who she is/was/will be in the wake of that-his world frankly is hard for me put into word, this reveals to us what her past has allowed to shadow her, moving her in the days after his death into her sensuality and heart, into love and perhaps her real meanings, into a journey to find her long ago forfeited child-prompted really by this father and his will. She is met along the way-gathered into it and held (for me like as if by a soul caretaker) by the most extraordinarily beautiful half brother and I'm working on the symbolism of this brother-a writer here saw Sampson/Delilah but I did not really see that....not at all...I saw that she needed to draw strength and protection and care from him, then she journeys into political dimensions in Gaza....her brother on leave from his soldiering work there takes her into this churning world and stays there when she needs him....I'm still working to figure my way through the action, the evoking of feeling.My wandering aside I agree that this story will be understood so intimately by those who come from these origins, looking in I glimpsed the pain, the confusion, the shifts in perspective, identity, and a sense of the mysteriousness.It was a fascinating experience. I'm so glad I turned on Sundance.My identification came with a figure that seemed utterly dis-engaged, wrapped in the need to protect and know her child- and face her choices, her life, her past, and realizes that she had lived with good and bad, but lived, a feeling things far beyond her in so many ways, a coming to terms with these realities.Actually I identified with the search for her child, and the meaning in being brought to meet her in probably the child's greatest moment of trauma and pain, ultimately there for her daughter. She was there.And I kept wondering after the last scene what would happen next...it was so strange a way to respond.

Ana is a cosmopolitan woman, whose origin provokes the doubt for anyone who asks her nationality.The movie begins with an arresting close up between these two faces on a train, in France. Ana reunites with her Israeli stepbrother Uli, once he informs her about of their father's death. She decides to return to Israel in search of her own daughter, whom she gave up at birth 20 years ago.The journey will imply to cross all sort of obstacles, geographical, legal and bureaucratic.But what they never kept in mind was the febrile tension, the effervescent turmoil of the military enforced disengagement of Israeli settlers in Gaza 2005.This clash of emotions, where the tormented conscious of Ana, the growing tension between civil and military forces plus the protests of Palestine people will lead to unpredictable consequences.A singular, courageous and straightforward film that will shatter you due its demolishing tragedy will be about to come.The cast is impressive, but Juliet Binoche and Hiam Abass shine in their respective roles.A must-see.

Believe me, I would not waste my time writing about this movie had I not come across a laudatory review of it on Amazon. Anyone who gains insight into the Israeli evacuation of settlements from Gaza after seeing this film must have an etiolated sense of history: no context is given for the pullout, but we are treated to scene after scene of jostling crowds, of slogans being shouted, of buildings being demolished, of mayhem and madness. I suppose if someone knows nothing about the events informing the movie that some knowledge might be acquired --- but at a cost of intense boredom. Most of the film takes place in France, and "murky" doesn't begin to describe the events that unfold there. No character is anchored in any kind of psychological reality, hints of incest abound, the deceased father is featureless, no grief is conveyed. When the Binoche character finally connects with her daughter, the viewer is shown an extended hugging scene that reveals the director's inarticulateness: no significant words are exchanged, and boredom gives way to irritation (at least in this viewer). With all the excellent films available, save yourself the unpleasantness of spending time with this misgotten effort. If you do see it, ask yourself: what prompted Juliette Binoche to sign on to this project?

Hard not to like anything with starring this particular actor. She's a screen goddess and a great mensch.Blown away yet again.