'Hila': A spectacular movie about a single mother's obsession - review

Michal Bat-Adam’s new movie, Hila, which opened throughout Israel on Thursday, is a flawed but touching drama about a Tel Aviv single mother and her young daughter. It captures the isolation of this small family and the yearning of both its members for community and acceptance. 

Bat-Adam, one of Israel’s most acclaimed actresses, is best known for a number of films she made with her husband, Moshe Mizrahi, notably I Love You Rosa (made in 1972 and set in Jerusalem’s Old City at the beginning of the 20th century) and The House on Chelouche Street (1973), both of which are available to stream on the Israel Film Archive website. After her success in front of the camera, she turned her hand to writing and directing, with decidedly mixed results.

Hila, which is very watchable in spite of its occasional and distracting descents into pretension, is certainly one of her best movies. 

What is the movie Hila about?

Hila (Jade Daiches Weeks) is an extreme version of a lot of single moms in that she has never told her child’s father about her and the two of them are on their own. She met Shaul (Yaakov Zada-Daniel), a famous writer, when he was interviewed on a television show where she worked. They immediately fell for each other, or so she thought, but it turned out that while she felt he was her great love, for him she was just a fling, one that he was happy to abandon as soon as his wife and daughter came back from a trip. 

Soon, he moved abroad with them, not knowing that Hila was pregnant. Fast forward about eight years: She is a documentary-film director who is so successful that she can afford a two-bedroom apartment in a central Tel Aviv neighborhood – you aren’t meant to think about how improbable that is, but I did. More believable is that her daughter, Naomi (Ayala Peleg), is an artistically inclined, well-adjusted seven-year-old with lots of friends. However, Naomi is starting to wonder why she doesn’t know her father and to ask questions about him, questions her mother evades.

The story gets going when Hila glimpses Shaul and his family on the street, heading into the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, where she follows them and tries to speak to her former lover. He glares at her and avoids an encounter. The surprise of knowing he is back in Israel and that he didn’t contact her throws her off. It affects her in every aspect of her life and most disturbingly compromises her ability to take care of Naomi, who instantly picks up on the fact that her mother is troubled about something. Hila is late to pick up Naomi from school, gets into bed before dinner and sleeps until the next morning, leaves her child alone when she is sick, and is generally less responsive. Hila calls Shaul obsessively, screaming at the phone when he doesn’t answer. 

It’s very relatable that she can’t forget this heel, despite how callously he treated her. The strength of her obsession begins to take over her life and awakens long-buried traumas. We see how her mother has always treated her coldly, and there is a flashback showing how her father took her to live with relatives on a kibbutz when her mother was pregnant with her second child and was struggling with her own mental health issues. Bat-Adam had a mentally ill mother and this is a theme that often comes up in her work. 

As Hila deteriorates, her daughter is sometimes left in perilous situations, such as when a pervy adult neighbor drops by to bring her candy when she is home alone, an exploitive plot turn that builds suspense over whether Naomi will be molested. Hila begins to have vivid and disturbing dreams, which are dramatized extensively. As she struggles to function, feeling guilty about not taking good care of her daughter, she pushes for a meeting with Shaul, which she childishly hopes will reawaken his love for her. 

But the longer story goes on and the more impulsively Hila behaves, the more it becomes clear that her problems really don’t have much to do with Shaul, and while you may root for her to hire a lawyer and demand child support from the smarmy literary celeb, you understand that she will still have all the same issues even if she manages to do that. 

The movie features much excellent writing. In a telling scene, she edits a documentary about motherhood and absent fathers that she is conveniently working on, and an older woman interviewed in the film talks about her longing for a father, saying, “I realized that no one can fill this hole, not a child, not a loved one, not a husband...” This brought to mind something that Marilyn Monroe – who grew up as the daughter of a mentally ill mother and was then put into the foster-care system – said to her then-husband Arthur Miller: that she could tell who in a crowded room was an orphan just by looking at the way they glanced around them with an intense longing for approval. Hila looks to Shaul to provide her with this kind of approval and it’s sad to see this since it’s clear he never will. The dialogue for the child characters is also first-rate.

While Hila and Naomi are two of the most likable characters I have seen in a long time, the movie is marred by a few missteps. One is that a too-easy love interest for Hila pops up, Michael (Pini Tavger), the security guard at Naomi’s school, who is a former child prodigy pianist who was paralyzed by pressure and let his parents down. This is an interesting story, but it seems like it might work as a stand-alone movie, and his memories are dramatized in extensive flashbacks that don’t lead anywhere. Additional problematic elements are the dream sequences where Hila’s father exchanges aphorisms with the doctor who is treating him, which play like a very weak copy of a Samuel Beckett play, and nobody needs that. 

A character-driven movie like this rises or falls on the performances of its leads, and Weeks and Peleg work wonderfully together as the mother and daughter. Peleg, making her movie debut, is a charmer and seems like a real kid, which makes it particularly upsetting when Hila lets her down. Weeks has a difficult task: She must make a deluded and at times self-absorbed character sympathetic, and she pulls it off. Instead of condemning her for bad parenting, if you have children, you are likely to start thinking of times you weren’t there for your own kids and wishing you could give her a hug. Moviegoers who can see past the film’s flaws will likely embrace the character Weeks portrays and the movie.