The Monkey House (2023) User Reviews

everybody lies!

[dromasca · 7/10 · 8 January 2024]

'Everyone lies!' is the favorite catchphrase of the main character in the American medical drama 'House, M. D.'. It could very well be the motto of Israeli director Avi Nesher's latest film 'Gan haKofim' which is distributed in the English language markets under the title 'The Monkey House' (incorrect translation, from the mysteries of the distributors). His characters surround themselves with smaller or bigger lies that they use to advance professionally and socially, secrets that they keep even from their best friends or even from those they love. The plot of the film, inspired by a real case, is based on deciphering such a network of untruths and on their accumulation leading to the moment of crisis, the one where lies become a burden that prevents the realization of dreams and the fulfillment of personal relationships that matter.

Amitay Kariv, the main hero of the film, is a writer. Israeli screenwriters seem fascinated by this profession, many of the intellectual heroes of recent Israeli films are writers. We never know how good a writer he is. What is certain is that at the time when the story of the film takes place, in the late 80s, he is in a creative crisis and in a period in the shadow - forgotten by readers and ignored by critics. To prepare a comeback, he invents a doctoral thesis about his work authored a PhD student and researcher living in America, a real person who has no idea that her name is being used for this purpose. To impersonate her on a documentation visit in Israel, he hires Margo, a young woman with ambitions to be an actress, who gets the job precisely because she also covered herself in an aura of lies at the interview. The talent of the young woman and the Pygmalion work of the writer create in a few days the character, who will fool many people - literary critics in particular - and will even convince Tamar, the youth love of Amitay, freshly widowed after a marriage that had also been a lie. The scheme starts to work, really well, until complications arise.

The structure of the narration is very interesting, Avi Nesher being also the author of the screenplay. The film opens with a film-in-film sequence that for several minutes makes viewers wonder whether they have not mistaken the cinema hall. Next, for much of the film, the story flows chronologically, accompanied by off-screen commentary from the narrator writer, few enough to not be too distracting. After a false ending to this main part that comprises about two-thirds of the action, we witness a succession of scenes that follow the heroes for several years following the main story. The change of pace is justified as many of the unsolved conflicts are explained and resolved. The lead role is interpeted by Adir Miller, one of Israel's most popular actors and showmen, at his fourth collaboration with Avi Nesher. His partner is a young and talented actress named Suzanna Papian who is almost a debutant in feature films, until this year she only played a few minor roles, mostly on television. The role in this film and a lead role in a popular television series deservedly catapulted her to stardom. The formidable Shani Cohen fits in very well as Tamar, the hero's unfulfilled love from his youth. The reconstruction of Israel as it was 30 or so years ago, a period in time when great changes in landscape and atmosphere took place, is rigorous and nostalgic. 'Gan haKofim' brings to the screens something from a world that disappeared, a world where moral dilemmas had a more important place in our lives. Avi Nesher is one of those filmmakers who do not intend to revolutionize the art of film, but who we can be sure does not compromise on quality. The characters in this film may be liars, but they look true and they successfully cross the screen involving the audience in their experiences.

They're all liars, but we feel for them

[Nozz · 9/10 · 4 October 2023]

At the Ophir Awards in 2003, The Monkey House received zero wins out of eleven nominations. Director Avi Nesher, a major figure in Israeli cinema, has been through several such disappointments before and indeed the male protagonist of The Monkey House is a once-popular author driven by the desire to overcome the neglect he now suffers from the critical establishment. He grumbles that even the Nobel Prizei is all about self-promotion and the nurturing of connections. We never receive any ringing confirmation that his work really was any good, but we easily sympathize with him, partly because it appears that what he is really looking for is a way of escaping death, or a way of achieving love.

There are other points where the movie touches on Nesher's own story. There is the loss of a character's son (Nesher's own son died in an accident) and there is a quest for fame in Hollywood (Nesher tried, but his only big successes have been in Israel).

The monkey house in the title is an abandoned little zoo high in the hilly section of Ramat Gan, adjoining Tel Aviv. At the end of the movie, Nesher inserts a photo of himself there and he dedicates the project to the memories of youth, although there are no child actors in the movie; childhood is present only in painfully melancholy retrospect. We get a glimpse of the climb up the hill in Ramat Gan, but it's a bit of a shame that the picturesque neighborhood doesn't get more screen time.

Avi Nesher loves to cast Adir Miller in his movies, and Miller as the male lead doesn't let him down here. Nesher also loves to cast Joy Rieger, but this time, for whatever reason, he chose the then little-known Suzanne Papian as female lead. By the time the film came out in Israel, she was already well-liked for the TV comedy/drama Sovietzka, and she also does Nesher proud here, more or less carrying the movie with Miller as her straight man.

Not that Miller has a simple role. One way in which Nesher still typifies traditional Israeli cinema is that he tries not to build a movie around a protagonist at all other characters' expense. Papian shines as a kind of comical, spunky, animated dream girl and her character gives the movie its lightheartedness while Miller is responsible for stolidly keeping the story believable. He's the one with a mission. In his determination to revive his reputation, he wants Papian's character to pretend to be the Israeli doctoral student in the USA who was about to finish a doctoral thesis about him and publish it as a book. But he is only pretending that such a student exists. Actually, the student - by the name he cites, and at the university he cites - does exist. It's the daughter of a local shopkeeper. But she never thought of writing such a thesis. At least to me, the script seems to founder on that point. Even though the movie is set decades ago when there was no internet, you couldn't pretend to be a local shopkeeper's daughter, and publish a book under her name, and expect not to be discovered - if not by the daughter far away in the USA, then by your own neighbors. It would have made more sense, in setting up the scheme, to choose an entirely fictitious name.

Anyway, besides that pair of liars, we also have the woman that Miller's character loved and lost; she has been lying about her happiness as a married woman and her grief as a widow. And there is a curiously tiny sidekick role played by Yaniv Biton - a childhood friend who is now a gay man in the closet. Nesher directs the audience's sympathy to each of them in turn.

Besides preferring not to focus on a single character, Nesher as writer/director often shrugs off the idea of stretching a plot across the film in a familiarly shaped arc from beginning to end. When it seems that The Monkey House is winding up, it pivots into a continuation that resolves certain issues much to the audience's gratification.