At the Ophir Awards in 2003, The Monkey House received zero wins out of eleven nominations. Director Avi Nesher, a major figure in Israeli cinema, has been through several such disappointments before and indeed the male protagonist of The Monkey House is a once-popular author driven by the desire to overcome the neglect he now suffers from the critical establishment. He grumbles that even the Nobel Prizei is all about self-promotion and the nurturing of connections. We never receive any ringing confirmation that his work really was any good, but we easily sympathize with him, partly because it appears that what he is really looking for is a way of escaping death, or a way of achieving love.
There are other points where the movie touches on Nesher's own story. There is the loss of a character's son (Nesher's own son died in an accident) and there is a quest for fame in Hollywood (Nesher tried, but his only big successes have been in Israel).
The monkey house in the title is an abandoned little zoo high in the hilly section of Ramat Gan, adjoining Tel Aviv. At the end of the movie, Nesher inserts a photo of himself there and he dedicates the project to the memories of youth, although there are no child actors in the movie; childhood is present only in painfully melancholy retrospect. We get a glimpse of the climb up the hill in Ramat Gan, but it's a bit of a shame that the picturesque neighborhood doesn't get more screen time.
Avi Nesher loves to cast Adir Miller in his movies, and Miller as the male lead doesn't let him down here. Nesher also loves to cast Joy Rieger, but this time, for whatever reason, he chose the then little-known Suzanne Papian as female lead. By the time the film came out in Israel, she was already well-liked for the TV comedy/drama Sovietzka, and she also does Nesher proud here, more or less carrying the movie with Miller as her straight man.
Not that Miller has a simple role. One way in which Nesher still typifies traditional Israeli cinema is that he tries not to build a movie around a protagonist at all other characters' expense. Papian shines as a kind of comical, spunky, animated dream girl and her character gives the movie its lightheartedness while Miller is responsible for stolidly keeping the story believable. He's the one with a mission. In his determination to revive his reputation, he wants Papian's character to pretend to be the Israeli doctoral student in the USA who was about to finish a doctoral thesis about him and publish it as a book. But he is only pretending that such a student exists. Actually, the student - by the name he cites, and at the university he cites - does exist. It's the daughter of a local shopkeeper. But she never thought of writing such a thesis. At least to me, the script seems to founder on that point. Even though the movie is set decades ago when there was no internet, you couldn't pretend to be a local shopkeeper's daughter, and publish a book under her name, and expect not to be discovered - if not by the daughter far away in the USA, then by your own neighbors. It would have made more sense, in setting up the scheme, to choose an entirely fictitious name.
Anyway, besides that pair of liars, we also have the woman that Miller's character loved and lost; she has been lying about her happiness as a married woman and her grief as a widow. And there is a curiously tiny sidekick role played by Yaniv Biton - a childhood friend who is now a gay man in the closet. Nesher directs the audience's sympathy to each of them in turn.
Besides preferring not to focus on a single character, Nesher as writer/director often shrugs off the idea of stretching a plot across the film in a familiarly shaped arc from beginning to end. When it seems that The Monkey House is winding up, it pivots into a continuation that resolves certain issues much to the audience's gratification.
There are other points where the movie touches on Nesher's own story. There is the loss of a character's son (Nesher's own son died in an accident) and there is a quest for fame in Hollywood (Nesher tried, but his only big successes have been in Israel).
The monkey house in the title is an abandoned little zoo high in the hilly section of Ramat Gan, adjoining Tel Aviv. At the end of the movie, Nesher inserts a photo of himself there and he dedicates the project to the memories of youth, although there are no child actors in the movie; childhood is present only in painfully melancholy retrospect. We get a glimpse of the climb up the hill in Ramat Gan, but it's a bit of a shame that the picturesque neighborhood doesn't get more screen time.
Avi Nesher loves to cast Adir Miller in his movies, and Miller as the male lead doesn't let him down here. Nesher also loves to cast Joy Rieger, but this time, for whatever reason, he chose the then little-known Suzanne Papian as female lead. By the time the film came out in Israel, she was already well-liked for the TV comedy/drama Sovietzka, and she also does Nesher proud here, more or less carrying the movie with Miller as her straight man.
Not that Miller has a simple role. One way in which Nesher still typifies traditional Israeli cinema is that he tries not to build a movie around a protagonist at all other characters' expense. Papian shines as a kind of comical, spunky, animated dream girl and her character gives the movie its lightheartedness while Miller is responsible for stolidly keeping the story believable. He's the one with a mission. In his determination to revive his reputation, he wants Papian's character to pretend to be the Israeli doctoral student in the USA who was about to finish a doctoral thesis about him and publish it as a book. But he is only pretending that such a student exists. Actually, the student - by the name he cites, and at the university he cites - does exist. It's the daughter of a local shopkeeper. But she never thought of writing such a thesis. At least to me, the script seems to founder on that point. Even though the movie is set decades ago when there was no internet, you couldn't pretend to be a local shopkeeper's daughter, and publish a book under her name, and expect not to be discovered - if not by the daughter far away in the USA, then by your own neighbors. It would have made more sense, in setting up the scheme, to choose an entirely fictitious name.
Anyway, besides that pair of liars, we also have the woman that Miller's character loved and lost; she has been lying about her happiness as a married woman and her grief as a widow. And there is a curiously tiny sidekick role played by Yaniv Biton - a childhood friend who is now a gay man in the closet. Nesher directs the audience's sympathy to each of them in turn.
Besides preferring not to focus on a single character, Nesher as writer/director often shrugs off the idea of stretching a plot across the film in a familiarly shaped arc from beginning to end. When it seems that The Monkey House is winding up, it pivots into a continuation that resolves certain issues much to the audience's gratification.