Ryan McNeil
When a festival program describes a film as “Lewis Carroll meets Carol Reed”, you best believe I’m buying a ticket.
THE WONDERS is a TIFF selection from Israel. The film centres around Ariel, or “Arnav” as his friends call him (means “rabbit”). One night Arnav notices strange things afoot in his apartment building – specifically, he sees a bound man being smuggled in. Before he can get too inquisitive about it, he is approached at the bar he tends by a curious hatted man named Gittis. Gittis coerces Arnav into helping him with a private investigation. In return, Gittis promises not to tip off the authorities that Arnav is the artist who has been painting cartoon characters on public walls. The investigation surrounds a would-be profit named Rav Knafo. Why the Rabbi has been kidnapped is not made clear to Arnav – just that he needs to keep an eye on him and work with the Rabbi’s sister-in-law, Ella to keep him safe.
But when things get this curioser and curioser, who can be trusted?
There are definitely a lot of noir elements to this film, underlined by the way the characters move around the nighttime shadows of Jerusalem and that we have a private eye named Gittis. The film likewise knows how to add a whimsical flourish or two, and it does by allowing Arnav’s cartoon artwork to some to life now and then and underline a plot point. The characters that exist in this handsome-yet-seedy world feel just as much Red Queen and Mad Hatter as they do femme fatale and gumshoe.
Much of the story hangs on the nature of devout belief where prophets are concerned. It suggests that many would-be leaders are not doing so for the greater good, but are in fact gathering masses around them strictly to line their own pockets (and the pockets of a select circle). What’s more, it wonders what to make of the people that flock to them, and their willingness to leave behind people who have cared for them a long time for a higher ideal.
While a film like THE WONDERS isn’t going to set the world on fire, it’s handsome, fluid, funny, and a worthy watch. Like all good noir, it leaves the viewer wondering who they can believe. The movie is an apt student of chemistry, since it tends to keep the focus either on Arnav and Gittis or Arnav and Ella. The camera loves all three actors, and finds many ways to bring out the qualities in them that their Wonderland counterparts possess.
THE WONDERS won’t be making any best-of lists at the end of the year, but it was a fun watch and a good palette-cleanser as the weekend wound down. It was interesting to see how a city like Jerusalem could be employed for this genre, and likewise how two genres like noir and fantasy could be combined.