Or shoulders a lot: she's 17 or 18, a student, works evenings at a restaurant, recycles cans and bottles for cash, and tries to keep her mother Ruthie from returning to streetwalking in Tel Aviv. Ruthie calls Or "my treasure," but Ruthie is a burden. She's just out of hospital, weak, and Or has found her a job as a house cleaner. The call of the quick money on the street is tough for Ruthie to ignore. Or's emotions roil further when the mother of the youth she's in love with comes to the flat to warn her off. With love fading and Ruthie perhaps beyond help, Or's choices narrow.
Ms. Yedaya may have made a subtler and more interesting film about prostitution than she originally intended.
– Andrew Sarris,
New York Observer,
23 Jun 2005
fresh:
This movie seems to be meditating on the whys and hows of the spoiling process -- raising more questions than can possibly be answered, and in this sense, at least, far from dogmatic.
– Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Chicago Reader,
5 Jul 2005
rotten:
Yedaya drowns her characters in realist grit, a colorless screenplay and no score to speak of, rendering this open book of a movie alienating in all the wrong ways.
– Ella Taylor,
L.A. Weekly,
14 Jul 2005
fresh:
A work of exceptional subtlety and is all the more captivating and heart-rending for being so.
– Kevin Thomas,
Los Angeles Times,
14 Jul 2005
rotten:
Her movie is indeed ambitious and her goals admirable. But sometimes it seems more position paper than cinema.