Avi Nesher's ‘Our Loves’ turns tragedy into immersive cinema - review

Avi Nesher’s latest movie, Our Loves, opened in theaters across Israel on Thursday and is a beautiful, moving film about ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.

It tells a story that is suspenseful, sad, sometimes even funny, and always human. It may even change the way you see the world – and yourself.

Nesher has described it as the story of seven people who all think they are having the worst day of their lives on October 6, 2023.

That’s really all you need to know about it going in, and yes, it does encompass the October 7 massacre, but it isn’t “an October 7 movie.”

It’s different from the television series Red Alert and One Day in October, for example, because it follows fictional characters living their lives who happen to get caught up in the massacre, while those series were dramatized versions of specific stories about real people.

They were like watching news reports acted out, while Our Loves is a different experience, a truly cinematic one.

The idea of people who thought they were as stressed as they could be on October 6 is a smart lens for tackling October 7. You get to know each character and are drawn into their stories.

The attack begins only after you have been engrossed in the movie for nearly an hour and have almost forgotten what is in store for the protagonists.

Our Loves opens with the quote: “Love is always immersive, anytime and anyplace, but it is more intense the nearer it comes to death,” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez from Love in the Time of Cholera.

This sets the tone for the characters’ stories, which, as the title suggests, are all about love in one way or another.

Playing with our expectations, the movie opens at a concert that turns out not to be the Nova Music Festival, but a rock concert on October 5 that most of the main characters attend for different reasons, and we get to know them gradually.

Among these characters is Shabi (Shalom Michaelshvili), an aggressive retired general who is divorced and suing his ex-wife to force her to sell their house, which she and their children don’t want to give up.

He tells himself he’s doing the right thing, but when he sees his strong-willed daughter, Liri (Noa Cohen), she can barely look at him.

Deep down, he knows he’s lost something, but he still can’t stop himself from continuing the court case, and there is a painful hearing on the morning of October 6.

Liri attends the rock concert to support her new boyfriend, Matan (Nevo Katan), a sound engineer working there, whose parents, Katya (Lena Fraifeld) and Gadi (Lior Miller), are splitting up because Katya has decided she needs to try living on her own.

Katya is moving into the young people’s section of the kibbutz in the Gaza border communities region where they live, right near Liri and Matan.

A policewoman, Mili (Magi Azarzar), on security duty at the event, is nervous because she plans to introduce her girlfriend, Sandra (Hadas Yaron), a nerdy nuclear scientist at the Dimona reactor, to her very traditional Moroccan mother (Evelin Hagoel).

Niso (Yaniv Biton), one of Mili’s police colleagues, is reluctantly quitting to move to Europe with his wife and take a lucrative marketing job.

Another one of the main characters, Sapir (Daniel Gimpel), a young religious woman, desperately wants to get married and start a family, but enjoys trance music and dancing, which the guys she dates see as an unwelcome wild streak.

On the morning of October 6, the boyfriend she thought she was getting engaged to dumps her.

Her friend (Kim Or Azulay) convinces her it’s time to have some fun despite the religious laws of Shabbat and Simchat Torah by attending the Nova festival.

Torn between religious duty and the need to rebel, Sapir agrees to attend the festival. She even takes a pill her friend buys from Yoyo (Leib Levin), a sexy drug dealer who keeps his stash in his underwear.

Suddenly, starting at 6:29 a.m. on October 7, the world around them changes at breakneck speed, and everything they do becomes a life-or-death choice.

But their personalities don’t change because they are under threat, and Nesher’s playful sense of humor and the absurd don’t disappear just because he is depicting a tragedy.

Shabi heads south to save Liri as soon as he learns her kibbutz is under attack, but he needs a rifle and some backup.

Stopping by an army base, he picks up four of the most clueless recruits in the history of cinema, all of whom have names starting with the same letter, which makes it even harder for him to tell them apart.

Only it may be better that way, he mumbles, because the likelihood that any of them will make it home alive is slim.

The comedy and tragedy of the four guys and Shabi continue throughout the day, and slowly, this arrogant general begins to truly question how he uses people, perhaps for the first time in his life.

Unexpected comedy comes up at other times, too, but I don’t want to risk revealing spoilers by giving away too much.

One moment that has stayed with me and exemplifies Nesher’s approach to the day’s events is when Matan’s former girlfriend (singer-actress Neomi Aharoni Gal, aka Nunu, who also performs the title song), who runs a hot-dog stand at the Nova, tries to flee carrying her hot-dog steamer.

A police officer, desperately trying to fight off dozens of terrorists with a handgun, yells at her to leave it and run, but she keeps trying to hold onto the heavy contraption, protesting that she can’t live without it.

Knowing what happened at the festival, we can see how foolish she is being, but at the same time, it’s understandable that she couldn’t switch gears instantly during the attack.

So many of us had trouble making the switch that day, and this moment in particular put me into the heads of the people at the music festival.

The excellent acting (Shalom Michaelshvili, best known as a comic actor, as the general, and newcomer Daniel Gimpel as the young religious festival-goer are standouts in a fine ensemble), original music, and stunning cinematography all flow together to tell the story.

The movie had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, despite the anti-Israel sentiment roiling the international cultural world.

Some of the reviewers there criticized the movie for not telling its story from the point of view of Hamas terrorists as well as the Israeli characters.

Nesher has said in interviews that he could not write from the point of view of a terrorist who would burn a family alive, and the truth is that, had he even attempted to tell the story from the terrorists’ point of view, he would have been accused of cultural appropriation.

Another point about the critical reception of the movie abroad is that reviewers full of staunch opinions on how Nesher should have portrayed the terrorists seem to have missed the fact that in a scene late in the movie, when several characters arrive at a hospital, the head doctor (Hisham Suleiman) is an Arab.

These reviewers do not know enough about the region to discern when characters are speaking Hebrew or Arabic, but they still think they know how this story should have been told.

One reviewer wrote, from the comfort of a Toronto hotel room, that “quite a few of the characters seem less distraught than one might expect given the circumstances,” as if she were intimately familiar with how people act during a day-long terror attack.

The remark also suggests she was unaware that Hamas fired tens of thousands of missiles at Israel prior to October 7, and that at first the attack seemed routine to many people.

But it’s the director’s triumph that he manages to get those of us who do know the facts about the conflict to forget the headlines and just get into the story.

In the key scene, when rockets fired by Hamas begin to fly toward the festival venue, we are so much in Sapir’s head that for a moment, when the light streaks across the sky, we, too, wonder whether we are seeing fireworks that are part of the festival.

In that moment, and several others, in an ambulance or on the road during a brief respite from the killing, we embrace life along with the characters.

Seeing this movie can be transformative, and after you watch it, you may look at your own life differently, just as the survivors in the movie do at the end of the day.

Nesher, one of Israel’s most acclaimed and popular directors, knows how to tell a story, or, in this case, stories. He started his career over 40 years ago with the classic army entertainment group movie, The Troupe.

He has also made such modern classics as Turn Left at the End of the World and, more recently, another drama based on Israeli history, Image of Victory, which told the story of both sides in the battle of Nitzanim in the Independence War.

It makes sense that he would be the director to find the human truth in the tragedy of this infamous day and turn it into immersive cinema.