Customer Reviews

Shem

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

For many twenty something's entering adulthood nowadays, it's hard to find ones place in society. Daniel, our protagonist in the movie is feeling fed-up and under appreciated with his dead-end job and like many people his age who would love to get away, decides to toss it all to the wind; his job, his income, his partner(s) and take a whirl-wind trip around Eastern Europe to get his mind off his dull dead end, seemingly meaningless life. What he encounters along his journey, contrary to his reasons for leaving however, begin to change his outlook on life and his ancestry. For those who wish to pick up and leave never to look back, Shem may just be what you need to get away, without leaving everything you know.

Beautiful scenes and cinematography and a handsome leading man do not make up for an awkward, disjointed, poorly-developed ride around Eastern Europe in search of a story. Add to that an unlikeable and unsympathetic leading character and you have picture-postcard quality beautiful emptiness, which is this movie.

I got through it hoping that it would have some point or resolution to tie it all together and make the journey worthwhile. It didn't happen. The story isn't here and the character development doesn't happen. You have to watch the extra on the DVD where the director "explains" the movie. It's helpful, as the movie isn't all that clear.

I'd stay away from this. It's a nicely shot and well put-together film in search of a meaning and lacking a story. It's not even worth a rental except maybe to get to see the scenery and shots around Europe.

Shem is a awesome movie about aveture and being young traveling across eastern europe Ash Newman does an awesome role in this film and made it interesting and exciting filled with much joy and sadiness.

Caroline Roboh's Shem doesn't follow the cliché rituals of Hollywood. It doesn't exhibit the inconclusive, abstract detachment of much French cinema. So it has been misunderstood by some who fault it for the apparent incompleteness of its plot. In fact it yields great riches if one realizes that the story is unfolding in words and images more than in external plot. The true plot is an inner plot. Who is Daniel and what is really happening to him?

Daniel is not particularly likeable at the start. But he exudes a youthful vitality irresistible to other characters, and to us. (He is played by the attractive Ash Newman in a performance that is fresh, subtle, various, committed, and forceful.) Despairing of his life of hedonism and self-absorption, Daniel responds to his grandmother's challenge to find the grave of her father, a righteous rabbi who, after sending his daughter to England, died in Europe in 1939. Daniel follows clues on a journey from city to city in Western and then Eastern Europe.

Hints that there is more than literal significance to the quest for a physical grave include several recurring visual and verbal motifs, like awakening from sleep; focus on Daniel's eyes with blindfold, sun glasses, and fake and real tears; the variety of Daniel's sexual escapades; the use of true and false names (the title of the film means "name" in Hebrew); the succession of places memorializing the Jews of Europe destroyed by the Nazi holocaust; the series of dead ends; the seductiveness of death and of images of death; and others. The turning points for Daniel--an empty synagogue with nothing but names on the walls, the appearance of an angel, a discovery about his great-grandfather's life--are not so much plot turnings as moral and psychological turnings.

One motif takes the form of an apparently unresolved sub-plot that has caused some reviewers to think the film badly edited. They miss the point. The activities of the spy ring in search of the "stones of the Temple" are far less significant as a hidden or incomplete plot than as a form of temptation for Daniel. Late in the film the ring presents Daniel with a reductive interpretation of his great-grandfather's life, and his challenge is to resist it. That the plot does not follow the spies themselves to some Hollywood resolution is not a flaw. The point is Daniel's response to the vision of reality they offer. Are the physical world and its pleasures the point of life, or is there more going on here? Is Daniel's true quest for a physical grave or--whether he knows it or not--for meaning and connection? When the viewer can answer this, the film turns out to be both deep and moving.

Incredibly handsome, sexually attractive for and accepting any gender partners, young Londoner is looking forwrd to opportunities outside his factual local Jewish ghetto-either in employment or sex.

A typically-Jewish clever loving grandmother offered him opportunity to travel Eastern Europe in a search for a grand-grandfather grave, a rabbi of pre-WWII Vienna (rather, some part of Czech regions).

Also financial abilities were of lesser question than possibilities to arrange unsupervised trip in pre-Mandragora part of Europe, with "Jewish luck"-plus-sex peppered, this tale of the modern Eastern European Jewry is a fun to watch-and the ending in Venice, a final is following the suite.

Rich of ideas and intentions, this movie is surely a winner for Asier (Ash) Newman's appearance himself.

I can only conclude after watching half this movie that those who gave it favourable reviews must be friends and family of the film maker.A good lookng young man having adventures in europe,whats not to like?Well...the good looking young man is extremely unlikable,as for the adventure part..nothing happens!this unlikeable brat wanders around europe looking for his grandfathers grave.He has a couple of contrived encounters which are totally without interest,the episode on the train is ludicrous,bad bad acting.the film looks as though it has been shot on an old video camera, the picture is soft,the colour washed out ,I am not jewish so all that jewish angst and self flaggelation was lost on me and the acting from everyone involved was so amateurish it is cringe making.So thats it.. no story,an unlikeable lead character,and poor picture quality,i gave up on this halfway through.what really annoys me is that i paid top dollar for it and ended up getting $3.00 for it at my local second hand dealer,thats about what its worth.What was film maker caroline robah thinking when she made this self indulgent piece of of nonsense who on earth did she think would find this drivel interesting?Ms robah give up film making and if you want to do something useful for the jewish community learn how to make bagels!