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| A scene from The Human Resources Manager. |
Backtrack in the Post-USSR
By John Esther
Winner of five 2010 Israeli Film Academy Awards and Israel's Oscar entry for Best Foreign Language Film, director Eran Riklis' The Human Resources Manager moves from Israel to Russia at a tank's pace, offering little more than meandering musings and mawkish meanings about work, duty, honor and human value.
Based on the novel, A Woman in Jerusalem, by A.B Yehoshua, screenwriter Noah Stollman situates The HR Manager (Mark Ivanir) at Jerusalem's largest bakery between a hard spot and rough space when one of the bakery's ex-employees is killed during a suicide bombing. Under attack at work and by the local press, The HR Manager (his job is his identity) must return the woman back to Russia for a burial. Promises to his own estranged daughter (Roni Koren) may not be fulfilled, again.
Once in Russia, The HR Manager encounters various sorts of sordid shenanigans by various Russian characters who are only going to make his task that much more difficult. Of course, there is that Russian bureaucracy. The victim's Ex-Husband (Bogdan Stanoevitch) is a brute. The victim's son (Noah Silver) is an angry adolescent. The victim's mother (Irina Petrescu) thinks the return of her daughter's body for burial is a mistake, food poisoning, etc. And here he thought he was doing something good for which everyone would thank him. At least he has all the spending cash he needs to make things right.
Slowly becoming a world-renown director, Riklis has made successful and moving films about self and group identity in such films as The Syrian Bride and Lemon Tree. Those films centered on the plight of women under pressure by society and self. They did not offer any easy answers and they were engaging. It seems Riklis lost some purpose with his latest film. An exercise in overstated ironies, hindered by contrivances and caricatures, The Human Resources Manager does not offer those merits.
(The Human Resources Manager screens Jan. 11, 4 p.m. Palm Springs Regal 9. For more information: THRM)
