A Quiet Heart (Eitan Anner, 2016) Israel

Reviewed by Gustav Arndal. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival

A Quiet Heart has many things going for it. It’s a commentary on religious intolerance. It concerns themes of belonging, artistry and isolation. Its setting is ripe with potential everyday conflict. And all the elements of the film come together to say… something.

Naomi is a secular young pianist who just moved from the progressive Tel Aviv to an orthodox neighborhood in Jerusalem to escape the pressures of the classical music she practices. Already out of place among her extremely religious neighbors, she starts getting harassed wherever she goes after she starts taking pipe organ lessons from an Italian priest at a local monastery. And as the harassment gets more and more uncomfortably close to her home she realizes there’s a story behind how the previous tenant left the apartment.

At every turn, she is met with people who see her as the other. A traffic officer issuing too many parking tickets. A religious matriarch who worries over her lack of custom and what it will mean for the neighborhood. The only person she connects with is the monk Fabrizio who sees her passion for piano and takes her as a pipe organ apprentice, never preaching or telling her how to think, only nudging her in the direction of enjoying her art.

And Naomi’s lack of enjoyment of music is what brought her to Jerusalem. We see the pressure of Tel Aviv from her stern father and obsessed ex-boyfriend which led her to flee and start over again. She bonds with her neighbor’s son and lets him play the piano the former tenant left behind. Music is used sparingly and there’s rarely a score not being played by the characters, making the moments where the silence is filled all the more gratifying, reflecting Naomi’s own love for music.

At times there are incongruities with the acting and the music – the piano starts playing too quickly after someone sits down, the music feels like it was prerecorded – but it’s a minor distraction as the film focuses on the actors rather than the playing.

And there are some decent performances in this film. The child actors are rarely convincing, but the supporting cast do their jobs well. Though Ania Bukstein absolutely overshadows those around her. Such a quiet, reserved character is hard to pull off without appearing emotionless and bland, but she does well considering what was given to her. It’s almost to the movie’s detriment. Ania has such a strange charisma, like she should be playing a statuesque deity instead of a confused girl, and it’s frustrating to see her attempt to pull off chemistry with a child actor who doesn’t speak a word the whole running time.

There’s a really good film hidden here, but they don’t pull it off. And it all comes down to the ending of the movie. The tension transitions expertly from the anxiety of being new to an alien environment to fearing for your life. Small, strange gestures gain new context over time and as the mystery of the old tenant unravels, Naomi loses her support systems. The abbot of the monastery refuses her access and even the activist from an anti-persecution support group leaves.

And then, at the most intense part… the film ends in a weirdly anti-climactic sequence involving out of character behavior and a moral that does not at all gel with the rest of the film. Plot lines and characters get dropped, conflicts lack resolution, and a film that just expertly showed the tension of having one’s life threatened over one’s beliefs ends with what’s essentially a “just stand up to the bully” speech.

It’s baffling to watch. I hope I am wrong and am just misunderstanding some core message, because this movie has some beautiful cinematography and colors. It builds a tension that I wish would reach a satisfying crescendo. Instead, it concludes in a way that almost invalidates the entire rest of the film. If there’s an alternate ending to A Quiet Heart, I might check it out, but until then it’s just a very good movie that falls flat on its face by the end.

[image taken from jerusalemfilmfund.com]