Give Amos Kollek's Restless this much: it may be the most aptly titled film at the Toronto International Film Festival, inspiring more than one viewer to furtively check their watch. Restless aims to be the sort of big, important film that thrives on the festival circuit, the sort of film with limited theatrical prospects that nevertheless deserves support because it addresses important issues. And Kollek has a history of producing exactly that sort of film, winning awards around the globe for his earlier work, but this time out it just feels as though he is trying far too hard and the film ends up crippled by a clumsy script and far too many mediocre performances.
Moshe is a two bit street hustler, an Israeli Jew who fled his country and entered America illegally twenty years ago and is now reduced to hawking low grade junk on the streets while scrawling his bitter, ranting poetry on cocktail napkins and scraps of toilet paper. Back in Israel the son Moshe abandoned in infancy has grow to adulthood, become a sniper in the Israeli army and effectively become an orphan due to the death of his mother - the only parent he has ever known. But that may change now that the exceedingly bitter Tzach - said abandoned son - has discovered his father's address among his mother's things.
Moving back and forth between New York and the Middle East - Tzach moves between Lebanon and Israel - Kollek aims to share the Jewish experience from two very different, but intimately linked, perspectives. You have the Jews of the diaspora, struggling to both maintain an identity while integrating with their new culture, and the Jews back in Israel, locked in a seemingly never ending conflict. Kollek has set himself a big - even enormous - task here and, unfortunately, struggles to keep his head above water throughout. The film is so consumed with making some sort of point with virtually every line that the characters are never really given any chance to breath, they seldom feel like real people. And while both Moshe and Tzach are well performed the secondary parts throughout the film are awkward and clumsy - particularly the bartender Yolanda who Moshe strikes up a relationship with.
In the early going Restless plays like film noir and, frankly, it would have been better off had it stayed in that world. Honestly, I'd love to see some noir coming out of the region in general as it seems a genre perfectly suited to that world and experience. But that noir favor is quickly lost here as Restless gets increasingly busy, jumping back and forth from region to region, and the characters become disappointingly flat with too little emphasis placed on their humanity and too much placed on having them represent larger groups and politics and issues. A disappointing entry from a film maker capable of much better.
