"The Human Resources Manager": A dry, hilarious Israeli "As I Lay Dying" - Quick Takes - Salon.com

Another in a long series of fascinating films coming out of contemporary Israel, "The Human Resources Manager" is a tragicomic, memorably gritty road movie with echoes of William Faulkner's great novel "As I Lay Dying." That might not be an accident, since this film from director Eran Riklis (whose other terrific films include "Lemon Tree" and "The Syrian Bride") is based on a novel by prominent Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua, who has frequently been described as the Jewish state's answer to the Nobel laureate of Oxford, Miss. For Yehoshua, Riklis and screenwriter Noah Stollman, this tale of an unburied corpse and the middle-aged executive who accompanies it on an unlikely journey becomes an oblique way of looking at recent Jewish history, and exploring fault lines in Israeli society.

At first, the grizzled, eponymous human-resources manager (Mark Ivanir) seems like the laconic hero of a rainy Jerusalem noir. It's 2002, with Palestinian terrorist attacks on the civilian population near a high point, and a worker at his family-owned bakery has lain unclaimed in the morgue for days following a bus bombing. She turns out to be Yulia, a Christian immigrant worker from an unnamed Eastern European country (it's clearly Romania), and the manager has to figure out why nobody noticed her absence, and take enough responsibility for her to fight back a tide of bad P.R. (Yulia is the only person in the story who is ever named -- a literary device handled with such naturalness that I didn't notice it until the movie was over.)

via salon.com