Review of Sweet Mud (2006) by John B — 24 Nov 2007

In the year leading up to his bar mitzvah, young Dvir (Tomer Steinhof) accidentally watches a man get intimate with a cow, tells a girl he loves her, steals some popsicles, and surreptitiously smokes. As a general rule: becoming a man + encountering messed-up adult sexuality + experiencing puppy love + rebelling in silly ways = coming of age. (It's a pretty foolproof equation.) But in Israeli film Sweet Mud Dvir does his coming of age within the context of a mid-1970s kibbutz in Israel. He steals his popsicles from the work-farm's communal kitchen. Dvir's mom is Miri (Ronit Yudkevitz), a depressed woman who daily struggles with the commune's strict rules and demand for conformity, but remains weirdly tied to the place. As Dvir navigates adolescence, Miri becomes more despondent. Director Dror Shaul (who, like Dvir, spent his formative years on a kibbutz) is leveling an obvious critique of the kibbutz system's set-up, and for the most part, he does so with a fairly light hand (save for some end-of-film histrionics by Miri). To frame his thesis, Shaul's created a organic-feeling cinematic world, full of communal decision-making meetings, jam-sharing, and free-wheeling European hippies looking to groove on the kibbutz's back-to-basics vibe. The film provides a fascinating window into a faraway time and place, which makes Dvir's journey down the well-worn path towards adulthood feel new.

(By me, The Coast).