A methodically austere depiction of stifled dreams and latent erotic desires in a small Israeli town, Tropicana is relentlessly bleak but grimly compelling, with a strong visual style to soften its harsh take on the human condition. World premiering this week in Karlovy Vary festival’s left-field Proxima competition, this emphatically art-house indie drama is young writer-director Omer Tobi’s debut feature, building on a track record of TV, short films and music videos. He is also one of the founders of Arisa, an LGBT party and arts organisation based in Tel Aviv. Indeed, there may well be some kind of queer allegorical subtext running through the film’s depiction of lonely souls and sexual outlaws, but if so it is well disguised.
Tropicana opens with an arresting image: a long, static medium shot of a naked woman dragging herself across a supermarket floor at night, smearing a trail of blood behind her. But anyone expecting some kind of murder mystery to follow is too steeped in conventional film syntax, as this homicidal attack soon becomes a marginal background detail in the life of the film’s stoical, thick-skinned anti-heroine. Orly (Irit Sheleg) is a middle-aged menial worker at the same grim-looking store where the attack took place, a cavernous grocery warehouse on the edge of town. Soon Orly makes a pitch for the dead woman’s newly vacant position as head cashier, grovelling to her boss, subtly badmouthing her potential rivals.
Back home in her grimy, mice-infested apartment, Orly’s domestic life mostly involves caring for her immobile, morbidly obese son and severely disabled mother, who has a poisonous tongue and a taste for hardcore pornography. On learning that Orly’s boss gave her a promotion, her instant response is to assume it was a sexual transaction: “did you go down on him?” she rasps, “did he touch you?”
Discreetly, Orly also has assignations with various clandestine lovers, relationships which Tobi leaves opaque and unexplained. One lengthy encounter involves a wheelchair user who has lost both legs below the knee, a sequence shot in a detached, slow-burn, almost real-time observational style. There is tenderness and empathy here, but also an uncomfortable air of voyeurism, plus glum hints that Orly is being paid for sex.
Drawing on autobiographical memories of the small town where he grew up with his family, Tobi paints the dusty backwater setting of Tropicana as a liminal space of eternal night, missed connections and solitary souls, an Edward Hopper painting transposed to the Israeli desert. Any last trace of warmth, friendship and joy seems to have packed up and left town long ago. A creepy, Lynchian otherness also hangs heavy here. As she locks up the supermarket at night, Orly spots a naked man in the parking lot, lurking and threatening. Naturally this bizarre sighting is left unexplained and unresolved.
In his Karlovy Vary press material, Tobi frames Tropicana as a celebration of body-positive images, championing desire and intimacy in the face of prudish, conservative Israeli society. A worthy motivation, but his tonal choices often work against these avowed intentions. Because this is a film full of bitter, alienated souls living miserable, repressed lives. With recurring focus on naked bodies of all shapes and sizes, it could be interpreted as a defiant statement against narrow and unrealistic beauty standards, but it often feels more intrusive than inclusive. Like Austrian provocateur Ulrich Seidl, Tobi seems a little too fixated on carnal desire as ugly, desperate, joyless compulsion. But in place of Seidl’s dark, deadpan, redeeming humour, the younger director deals mainly in low-voltage despair.
On the positive side, what saves Tropicana from sinking into pure misery porn is Tobi’s strong aesthetic voice, finding visual poetry in this spiritually bereft, emotionally barren twilight zone. A surreal scene set in an underground desert bunker, which appears to be some kind of health spa, has an eerie sci-fi horror feel, partly because the screenplay offers minimal explanatory dialogue or context, leaving viewers to imagine some nameless horror lurking around the next corner. As a feature debutant, Tobi shows ample promise here, crafting a moody, cryptic semi-thriller from thin and disjointed material. Hopefully next time he can apply this stylistic flair to a more coherent, substantial narrative.
Director, screenwriter: Omer Tobi
Cast: Irit Sheleg, Rivka Bachar, Ilanit Ben Yaakov, Dover Kozashvilli, Amir Ishar, Rinat Matatov
Cinematography Philippe Lavalette
Editing: Guy Nemesh
Art director: Ben-Zion Porat
Producers: Hilla Medalia, Gil Sima, Paul Cadieux
Production companies: Medalia Productions (Israel), Sima films (Israel)
World sales: Sima Films
Venue: Karlovy Vary Interational Film Festival (Proxima Competition)
In Hebrew
82 minutes
