Life According to Agfa

Though originally released in 1992, Life According to Agfa appears within the festival’s schedule as part of the “City to City” program – with each of this year’s titles set in and around Tel Aviv. The movie, which unfolds primarily within the claustrophobic confines of a grungy bar, follows a series of underdeveloped, hopelessly sleazy characters as they interact with one another over the course of one long night, with a particular emphasis placed on the establishment’s grizzled (yet oddly promiscuous) owner, a cop on the hunt for an easy lay, and a suicidal girl who has been ordered not to be alone by her psychiatrist. Filmmaker Assi Dayan’s penchant for placing his characters into the most mundane and downright banal of situations sinks Life According to Agfa almost immediately, and it becomes increasingly difficult to overlook the movie’s aggressively uneventful sensibilities (ie why should we care about any of these people or their eye-rollingly soap opera-esque problems?) The uniformly amateurish performances prove effective at perpetuating the community-theater-type atmosphere, while Dayan’s low-rent visual choices ensure that the film is as dull visually as it is thematically. And because the film only grows more oppressive and interminable as it progresses, the violent climax, presumably meant to come off as shocking and disturbing, is entirely lacking in the emotional power that Dayan is clearly aiming for (with the derisive laughter from several critics during this sequence certainly confirming its ineptitude).

1/2* out of ****