Tel Aviv on Fire

Release Date: August 2, 2019 (limited)
Runtime: 100 minutes
Rating: Not Rated (probably a PG)
Studio: Cohen Media Group
Director: Sameh Zoabi
Cast: Kais Nashif; Lubna Azabal; Yaniv Biton; Maisa Abd Elhadi; Nadim Sawalha; Yousef ‘Joe’ Sweid; Ashraf Farah

 
This slight yet clever unlikely buddy comedy wants so badly to be a biting satire on current relations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Tel Aviv on Fire is endearing, but alas, for naught.

Aimless twenty-something Salam (Kais Nashif), manages a living as the Hebrew language liaison for the pulpy Palestinian soap opera Tel Aviv on Fire, a job he acquired through sheer nepotism. Salam’s uncle, the kindly Bassam (Nadim Sawalha), you see, is the show’s producer. Salam, however, has a nasty habit of impulsively voicing his own opinions on the show’s dialogue and interrupting filming, an annoying practice that eventually causes the show’s lead writer to quit in frustration. His show now short a writer, Bassam opts to promote his nephew to the writing staff of Tel Aviv on Fire. Problem is, Salam has little to no idea of how to write scripted television. Salam nonetheless recognizes that this is his big-boy moment to prove to everyone, particularly estranged girlfriend, Miriam (Maisa Abd Elhadi), that he can handle any sort of responsibility. As movie luck would have it, Captain Assi Tzur (Yaniv Biton), the chief officer at the checkpoint through which Salam must pass daily as a Palestinian working in Ramallah (Palestine), but living in Israel, is familiar with the show. In the sort of contrivance you only find in the movies, Aziz’s wife, along with seemingly every woman in both Israel and Palestine, is a huge fan of the show (nothing, it seems, unifies humankind more than melodrama!). This unlikely commonality leads to a sort of ghost writing partnership between the two men: Assi will think up storylines for each day’s episode, which Salam will then transpose into scripts. It’s a clever, if incredulous, setup in which to explore, however superficially, the apparently benign ties that bind two nations constantly in conflict.

The movie works more on the comedic front than as political satire, but doesn’t work especially well as either. The first half of the film breezily zips along and contains some very funny moments (an early episode surrounding the word ‘explosive’ gets some decent laughs), but the picture loses serious momentum at the three-quarter mark, when personal crises need to be addressed. Luckily, Tel Aviv on Fire rebounds for the last act and satisfactorily wraps everything up nicely and cleanly.

The plot is flimsy, no doubt, but the actors invest the necessary good will and likeability that a movie like this demands, and the whole enterprise goes down rather painlessly. Leads Nashif, Biton, and Lubna Azabal (as the French diva/star of the soap), are great in one-dimensional roles (Azabal has some fun moments as her character on the show), and the production, thankfully, looks like a film and doesn’t carry over that television look and feel it imbues in the TV show scenes.

Some congenial mileage is gleaned from the improbable relationship that develops between Palestinian Salam and Israeli Assi, but the movie doesn’t dive deeply enough into the troubling circumstances which might, in reality, result from such a friendship. Nothing is truly at stake in the lives of the two men, other than a plot point involving Assi’s confiscation of Salam’s identification papers, which Assi holds as blackmail to ensure that his storylines make it to air. As a result, Tel Aviv on Fire winds up as nothing more than a mildly amusing, safe, weekend-watching diversion.

In Hebrew & Arabic with English subtitles.