At least initially, the film rests on the shoulders of Netta Shpigelman, who is not a big name in Israeli film. Her career has been primarily on the stage, although she popped up on TV in a tour- de-force impersonation the late Israeli poet Yona Wallach that had much of the audience guessing. Most films that are this focused on a single character provide a confidante or a sidekick so that the lead character's feelings can be given voice. In NADIA, the Aschers dispense with that convention and Shpigelman carries the ball, together with a script that sometimes skips details (or skips twenty years) and trusts the audience not to demand them, until the male lead pops up rather late in the movie. Although he appears in a scene or two without Nadia, he is not much of a character in his own right; he is just a garden-variety dead-handsome husband out of any woman's summer reading.
One reviewer was bothered that there isn't enough visual indication that Nadia ages 25 years in the course of the movie. It is a fault, and one or two coincidences are unfortunately forced, but as long as the movie follows Nadia, skipping from incident to incident and inviting the audience to react along with her to the hard choices that life presents, just about everything works.
One reviewer was bothered that there isn't enough visual indication that Nadia ages 25 years in the course of the movie. It is a fault, and one or two coincidences are unfortunately forced, but as long as the movie follows Nadia, skipping from incident to incident and inviting the audience to react along with her to the hard choices that life presents, just about everything works.