My Daughter My Love

Although maybe this movie wasn't preponderantly filmed on location in France, where the story is set, it's reminiscent of those works of the French New Wave that preferred a succession of intriguing scenes to a thrilling one-track-minded plot.

A decade ago, Sivan Levy won Israel's top acting award for the film Six Times, where she played a girl who looks for love in all the wrong places. My Daughter My Love could be thought of not only as a kind of comeback but almost as a kind of sequel, as if her character had grown up and still kept mismanaging her life. As we wonder what her problem is, so does the ostensibly main character, her father, who has dropped by for an entirely different reason and doesn't realize how much has gone wrong. Along with him, we see the situation reveal itself from a number of different angles, but in no hurry and not without tangential material.

One odd aspect of the movie is that occasionally the actors' faces are seen less than clearly as they speak, as if to allow for dubbing later. But although Sivan Levy wasn't nominated this time for the national acting award, Sasson Gabai was (as her father) and so were Albert Iluz (as her father's confidant)-- and Shem Tov Levi for the musical score.