By Mónica Delgado

Israeli filmmaker Keren Yedaka returns to Cannes, but this time in the Un Certain Regard section, with a dry drama about an incestuous relationship between father and daughter in Tel Aviv. As in previous efforts by Yedaka already presented in the festival, some motifs of extreme “feminine” are still being pursued, issues reflected on survival situations from the filial subject matter (prostitute mothers, fights for legitimate children and now incest) that show in some way this “feminist” cinema, that seeks to lecture us using heroines as scapegoats, testing internal struggle thesis to achieve status quo ruptures in an almost miraculous way.

In That Lovely Girl (Loin de mon pere, in french) there’s an elaboration of the feminine portrait coming from permanent shock, a story of the intimacy of a girl in love with her father, whom which she establishes a relation of ambivalent power based in a pulling and pushing of sincerities and furies. Yedaya is interested in registering how her character responds in each situation of abandonment, in her bulimia and decadence, which is evidenced in a borderline physical state, where the only obsession is receiving the love of the father/lover.

If the subject of incest allows for several readings (even from the act of fiction: it’s a representation and in the end we’re not in front of a father and daughter), Yedaya is more interested in showing the progression of the inner character trouble before liberation (or condemn, at the end) and does so through fixed shots and the use of zoom to chase faces that face weakness. That Lovely Girl, despite its sensationalist topic, and its treatment of the heroine as Voltaire’s Candide, shows the tabu as an unusual analogy confronting the possibility of a change beyond all evil.

Director: Keren Yedaya
Cast: Maayan Turjeman, Tzahi Grad, Yaël Abecassis.
Un Certain Regard
France/Israel
2014