Israeli film ‘Red Flower’ copes with the carnage in Sderot - review

Imagine a Moroccan couple in a John Cassavetes movie, only this movie is set in Sderot and the husband and wife are watching the news all day on October 7, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what Haim Bouzaglo’s latest movie, Red Flower, is like.

The movie is showing at the Tel Aviv Cinematheque.

It may seem odd to invoke the name of Cassavetes in connection with a movie about the South of Israel during the massacre. Cassavetes was an American director known for intimate examinations of troubled marriages that felt – and often were – improvised, many of which starred his very beautiful, very talented actress wife, Gena Rowlands, who recently passed away.

He was also an actor, best known for playing Mia Farrow’s husband who makes a deal with the devil in Rosemary’s Baby. But he will be remembered most for A Woman Under the Influence, starring Rowlands as a woman struggling with her sanity and trying to please her sometimes brutal but loving husband, played by Peter Falk. There is much anger and bitterness between the couple, as well as moments when they make up. Most of the action takes place within the couple’s cramped apartment.

While Bouzaglo, who has made such movies as Time for Cherries and Fictitious Marriage, may have not consciously used A Woman Under the Influence as the template for Red Flower, the movie’s claustrophobia, during which the tensions in their marriage play out, evokes the 1970s classic. Red Flower takes place almost entirely in a couple’s apartment on the evening of October 6 and during the day on October 7.

This couple are the Vaknins, Albert (Albert Iluz) and Annette (Annette Cohen). They are portrayed as an ordinary, observant couple living in Sderot, who are having a bit of a hard time getting used to their empty nest and talk about missing their grown children.

Bouzaglo had previously made a movie about these characters, Roses Gate, in 2022, which portrays how they cope when one of their sons develops a serious gambling habit. Once the war broke out in 2023, Bouzaglo and his cameraman returned to Sderot as soon as they could and began filming. They eventually filmed Red Flower with the same actors, as a sequel to Roses Gate.

As that fateful Shabbat eve begins, Annette and Albert are happy to get a visit from their son, Elia, who is heading to a music festival with some friends.

The next morning

When the sirens start blaring the next morning, they soon get a call from Elia, who is at the Nova music festival. Realizing that he wouldn’t call unless it was a matter of life and death, they break the laws of Shabbat and the holiday to speak to him. Hearing his plea for help, they call the police and beg them to rescue their son, who is hiding in a dumpster. They also worry about their niece, who is in the border police.

It soon becomes clear to them that the police station right across from their house has been overrun by terrorists. As Albert looks out the window, we see clips of news footage of that police station on that day, including one in which two little girls were rescued by the police from a vehicle after their mother was killed.

They also watch the news and see what is happening all over the South, including, and most worryingly for them, at the music festival. It’s understandable that they feel that the country has collapsed completely and that they may die soon.

As the day progresses and their son stops answering his phone, they begin to quarrel, falling into old patterns of marital discord, and it is these moments that will remind you of a Cassavetes film. Annette is 21 years younger and feels herself more attractive than her husband, angrily telling him she wishes they had never married.

All of these are very human moments, and it’s believable that they would erupt at times of stress, but they won’t make you forget the slaughter playing out all over the South. Even their building’s rooftop becomes part of the battle, as IDF soldiers use it as a staging ground to fight the terrorists, dropping by their apartment occasionally to use the bathroom.

As the day goes on and they pray frantically for their son, his friends, and their niece, Annette becomes defiant, and in the most charming scene, decides to paint her fingernails in the midst of the sirens and skirmishes. “Sinwar isn’t going to decide when I paint my nails,” she declares.

While the movie is an attempt to ground a story of the war in the context of a portrait of a marriage, the scenes of them grappling with the carnage are far more moving than their squabbles. It’s their courage, rather than their sometimes mean-spirited candor with each other, as realistic as that may be, that you will remember when Red Flower is over.

There are two recent documentaries set in Sderot and Ofakim about how the locals coped with the terror attack: Eitan Cohen’s Where Will You Go, which tells the story of two elderly friends from Sderot who have been evacuated to Tel Aviv, and Zohar Wagner’s Rachel from Ofakim, about the woman who famously fed her captors cookies as she and her husband were held hostage, currently available on Kan.org.il.

Also available is the docudrama One Day in October on Yes TV, by Daniel Finkelman and Oded Davidoff, which offers dramatized versions of four stories from October 7. These series and films are highly recommended, and it may be too early to try to mix a great deal of personal drama with the stories of the war, as Bouzaglo has attempted in Red Flower.