- Longing
- Written and directed by Savi Gabizon
- Starring Richard Gere, Diane Kruger and Suzanne Clément
- Classification N/A; 111 minutes
- Opens in Toronto and Vancouver June 7
A tonally bizarre and dramatically inert feature that is so detached from baseline human emotion it might as well be the fever dream of Artificial Intelligence, the new Canadian-Israeli film Longing is the most frustrating cinematic experience of the season.
Richard Gere stars in a very Gere-esque role, playing Daniel, a wealthy New York bachelor without a care in the world. That is until he’s informed – during an encounter so awkwardly scripted that it seems to be setting up a parody that never arrives – that he has a secret son from an affair with his long-ago lover Rachel (Suzanne Clément). What’s more: that son just died in a car accident.
Seeking some mixture of solace and penance, Daniel makes his way back to Rachel’s hometown of Hamilton – yes, the Hammer itself, plus scenes shot in nearby Kitchener and Cambridge – to bury his child and perhaps find a deeper purpose to his life.
But what follows is a genuinely head-scratching journey that feels only accidentally absurd. In relatively quick succession, Daniel stumbles into subplots involving a drug deal gone bad, a student-teacher flirtation that mistakes malevolent behaviour for quirky naivety and one nauseating swerve into anti-abortion territory that feels ripped from an evangelical melodrama. Not one of the situations is resolved, though it’s not as if audiences will be bothered to request narrative closure, so recessive is the muted endeavour.
On the surface, it appears as if writer-director Savi Gabizon – remaking his own 2017 Israeli film – is riffing on the dark comedy of life’s gravest matters. Yet every stiff directorial decision – from the robotic dialogue to the woefully lost performances from pros like Gere and Quebec superstar Clément – suggests that the filmmaker is treating his ridiculous material with a fatal solemnity. Perhaps this all worked better in Hebrew. But rendered into English, Gabizon’s vision isn’t so much lost in translation as it is consigned to linguistic oblivion.
Only Diane Kruger, as a high-school French teacher who once caught the lustful eye of Daniel’s son, manages to escape this car crash of a co-production unscathed. Well, until Gabizon has the actress enact an ostensibly evocative but just plain indulgent fantasy sequence in which her character, naked and enlarged to the size of Godzilla, straddles the local high school while pleasuring herself. It is likely not the strangest sight that residents of the Hammer might ever see in their hometown, but it’s certainly up there.