Seven Blessings (Ayelet Menahemi, 2023) Israel

Reviewed by Lauren Howard.  Viewed at Metro 4 Theatres, Santa Barbara, CA

Seven Blessings takes the audience and takes us on an emotional roller coaster to solve the mystery of the emotional roller coaster. Some of the characters are lucky enough to jump off.  But this Family dinner manages to stay very together. The petty challenges that they carry from childhood to death are dissolved in love. Love simmers and pops up in every sitting.   

Ayelet Menahemi,  director of the family drama, Seven Blessings, got a lot of things right. The first scenes the audience is trapped when the film begins during the wedding.  This could be a chick flick. But then the only thing that confronts the audience is drama, drama, drama.  This family is so dysfunctional it makes sense that they do not get together that often. Or so it seems.  

These seven blessings’ meals in seven days are about how long it takes the main character to blow her top.  She seems like such a balanced person…she takes herself to the brink about her family’s secrets and misunderstandings.  This wedding tradition of deep religious and cultural origin, makes this film expose the dynamics of a family that has the option of not getting together, but they still do.  Family ties are super strong.  Like a vice grip. Here: language, culture, fabric, food, wine, neurosis, and addictions run through as themes that are very relatable.  

Mealtime is a great equalizer and thread for many of the films that I have seen during the SBIFF. What they eat and where they eat shows the economic strengths of the host, or not. Another film that I saw that had this was The Movie Teller. The demeanor of the family and what was on the plate changed according to the economic dynamics of the families’ good times and tough times.   

This film is packed. Crowded. And boils over with lives big family benchmarks. Birth, marriage, the cause of the film (child rearing), and death. I am not Jewish, so the wedding celebration in the movie was a bit of a surprise. That is something that makes it very interesting. For a Hebrew person I am sure it must be a quite different watching experience.  Reymond Amsalem plays Marie, the lead and co-writes with Eleanor Sela. There are very few credits for the other actors besides this film. This film is cast perfectly.  

Ayelet Menahemi’s editing of the film must have been on the easy side for sectioning the film off with the different family members’ homes who host the meals. I had to Google it to understand the wedding blessing at the wedding is the same blessing said repeatedly at every event. The hard part for Ayelet Menahemi had to be the camera work to get all the shots with all those people! The movie turned a cacophony into a symphony. It is a serious chick flick. I highly recommend seeing the movie.