Balada le'aviv ha'bohe

The trailer for "Ballad of the Weeping Spring" arouses curiosity by starting with an electric bass that echoes forth the opening notes of the Theme from Exodus. One of those musical coincidences, you wonder, or do they really plan to work the Theme from Exodus into a movie about something else entirely? The answer is that the movie itself never includes those bass notes, but it does include a great deal of pleasant ethnic music and the characters are almost all musicians (although sometimes the actors seem to be performing out of synch with the soundtrack). The music carries you painlessly through a melodramatic and somewhat predictable plot that revolves largely around lead actor Uri Gavriel and the only slightly less craggy-looking-- but deadly, as it turns out-- hills of rural Israel. Gavriel, who graduated from years of playing forbidding tough guys, knows which of his many facial wrinkles to twist for every scene. The plot has been compared to The Magnificent Seven-- but many other movies could have been invoked, even The Blues Brothers-- in that it consists of rounding up a dream team, partly veterans and partly new guys, to fulfill a mission. The quest takes us through a curiously antique Israel: although the male romantic lead seems to have come more or less out of the present-- he would rather program a synthesizer than play an oud-- the houses are all of stone and we never see a cell phone or a computer. Judging from the vehicles people drive and the transistor radio someone listens to, not to mention a tabletop film projector, we could be in the sixties although the film never announces it. Or it could just be a re-imagination of the present with certain things curiously missing-- like Arabs, apartment houses, TV, street signs, and Ashkenazic Orthodox Jews-- and with certain curious additions such as Sicilian-looking hats for almost all the men. Anyway, the film holds interest and there's never been another one quite like it.