‘Broken’s‘ alternative Israel

At its cleverest, “Broken Wings,” the hit debut from Israeli writer-director Nir Bergman, is a provocative sociological lesson-movie.

The problem in Israel, it says subtly, isn’t what everyone thinks. It’s not religious conflict or fanaticism but, rather, economics, same as everywhere. No matter their religion, ordinary Israelis struggle to make ends meet.

Mr. Bergman’s debatable point is hunkered low in a brisk chain of scenes involving the domestic crises of a working-class family. The action is set in Haifa, an industrial port city where Arabs and Jews get along relatively well.

Haifa is strikingly normal. We see smokestacks and sexy billboards. We see pot smokers, rock bands and Reeboks.

Notice: Not a hint of suicide bombers or cross-border shelling.

All this good, incisive stuff is unfortunately saddled on the back of the tedious, soap-operatic grief of the Ulmans.

Recently widowed Dafna (Israeli stage star Orli Zilberschatz-Banai) works a hospital night shift as a midwife.

Barely able to cope with the loss of her husband, she juggles her breadwinning responsibilities with the fraying lives of her four fatherless children, ranging from kindergartner Bahr (Eliana Magon) to 17-year-old Maya (Maya Maron).

The children’s difficulties rise in direct proportion to their ages. Young Bahr has a bed-wetting problem. Ido (Daniel Magon), at 11, is silent, angry and rash. He’s intent on filming himself jumping into the deep end of an empty pool, an activity that leads to the movie’s central medical melodrama.

Sixteen-year-old Yair (Nitai Gvirtz) has turned into a gloomy layabout, drunk on Nietzschean atheism. It’s implied that both he and Maya left school during the traumatic period of their father’s death.

Yair is deemed psychologically unready to return to class; his sole productive activity is to distribute advertising fliers while dressed in a ridiculous mouse get-up.

Maya chafes at being the de facto mother of the household when, under normal circumstances, she’d be the carefree singer of her promising local rock group.

The movie opens with her riding a bicycle home from an evening gig. She wears a pair of wings onstage, a symbolic touch that, as the movie unfolds, could hold more than one meaning.

As talented as its ensemble cast is, “Broken Wings” is mopey where it should be sympathetic; predictable where it should be tense.

Mr. Bergman entangles the movie’s high meaning in a thicket of daytime-TV monotony. A redeeming revelation comes late: the where and how of the father’s demise.

You speculate morbidly that he died on a bus or at a restaurant, the victim of Palestinian terrorism.

Not in this Israel, where life is all too normal.

**1/2

TITLE: “Broken Wings”

RATING: R (Profanity, brief nudity, drug use)

CREDITS: Written and directed by Nir Bergman. Produced by Assaf Amir. Cinematography by Valentin Belonogov. Original music by Avi Belleli

RUNNING TIME: 86 minutes, in Hebrew with subtitles

WEB SITE: www.brokenwings.co.il

MAXIMUM RATING: FOUR STARS