There’s usually a moment in the first 10 or 20 minutes of a film that signifies whether it’s going to be a terrible movie or a good one. Nothing monumental needs to happen in the film itself for this moment to come about. It’s something that I either do or don’t do: check the time.
If by minute-15 in a film I find my eyes straying from the screen to look down at the digital face of my wristwatch to calculate the exact minute the credits will begin rolling, I know that the countdown is going to be miserable.
When it comes to foreign films, my feelings of dread are exaggerated—I’ll have to keep my eyes on the screen for every single second of the film because of the necessity of reading subtitles. Such is the case with Graham Guit’s Hello Goodbye.
The film follows Alain and Gisele Gaash, a French middle-aged married Jewish couple (Gisele converted) in crisis after their son gets married. The problem: Their son was married in—gasp—a Christian church and his new wife is a Christian girl. Feeling lost and confused, Gisele decides that they need a change. She wants to get in touch with her husband’s Jewish roots. She wants to go to Israel.
Alain, on the other hand, couldn’t care less about his Jewish roots. He’s a gynecologist with a good practice and he likes to play tennis at the club. He doesn’t need to go anywhere, but to make his wife happy he decides to take her on a vacation to Israel. At first, he tries to buy her a car, but she drives it into a tree—which is supposed to get laughs, but it only makes Gisele seem more obnoxious than she already does.
Gisele falls in love with “the land of milk and honey” and, much to the dismay of Alain’s family, she begs him to move there. So they make the move and it’s an absolute disaster.
Among other woes, the job that was promised to Alain isn’t really available (“Do you know how many gynecologists there are in Israel? A lot.”), their container of furniture gets tossed into the ocean in transit, and they were screwed over on their apartment (i.e., it doesn’t exist).
The significant problem with all of this is that there is absolutely nothing funny about it and because the attempted humor is only that—attempted—much of the scenes in the film just feel awkward. The viewer isn’t asked to have any emotion for the characters (except maybe when Gisele forces Alain to get circumcised at the age of 50).
Part of this is the lack of plot development. We know by the opening scene that Alain is, technically, Jewish, but his family doesn’t really act like it. We don’t get any scenes that explain the relationship between mother, father and son, so the conflict with his marriage is difficult to understand.
There are several moments in which Alain tells his wife that she must cut the cord with her son (because apparently they talk too much, though we only see her on the phone with him once in the film), but since we have no scenes with the two of them interacting, the joke falls flat.
It’s the end of the film that is the most perplexing. After having a miserable time in Israel, when he wants to move back to France, Alain tells his wife (spoiler alert) that they should stay. He tells another person that Tel Aviv is “home.” The problem is that nothing in the film has expressed that. We’ve only seen him miserable, so why on earth would he want to stay?
That question, along with many others brought up by loose ends in the film never gets answered, but, in the end, it doesn’t even matter. The lack of a strong plot line and understanding of how the characters relate to each other only serves to make it forgettable.