Live and Become

'Live and Become' has some well-observed moments but too much has been crammed in.

Herald rating: * * *

A Romanian-born, French-based Jew who fled the Ceausescu regime and now speaks both his native and adopted languages with a foreign accent, writer-director Mihaileanu has much in common with the hero of his slow but often moving drama.

The title, which may sound less clumsy in French, is an instruction issued by the mother of the film's main character when she sees a chance for him to escape from a refugee camp in Sudan in the mid 1980s (the humanitarian disaster that prompted the Live Aid concerts).

Many of the refugees are Ethiopian Jews - the so-called Falashas, who trace their bloodlines back to Solomon and the Queen of Sheba - who are spirited away to the Jewish homeland in a Mossad-sponsored operation. Among them is a 9-year-old Christian boy whose mother orders him to board the transport. "Go," she tells him. "Live. Become."

The first two he accomplishes but the third is more problematic, since the boy, who claims the name Solomon and is renamed Schlomo, is forced to live a lie that makes him not entirely sure what he is. Worse, to prosper in his new life, he must disown his past, including the mother who loved him so much she disowned him.

The film spans some 20 years in the life of Schlomo, played successively by Agazai, Abebe and Sabahat, and takes him through adoption, school, first love, a spell on a kibbutz, medical training, marriage and a return to his homeland at a speed that is sometimes headspinning. Inevitably, perhaps, it's hampered by an unevenness of pace as Mihaileanu struggles to cram in more than a dozen episodes.

Sometimes he distills themes into well-observed moments - the refugee's puzzlement at water on tap; his inability to draw a picture in school that captures the essence of Mother's Day; his need to feel the earth beneath his bare feet. But in the end it feels rather deliberate and schematic, seldom genuinely moving and always competent rather than excellent.

Technically, it's very accomplished - the money from several European and Israeli sources has been well spent - and Mihaileanu is plainly a competent filmmaker.

But although it's a touching and powerful meditation on culture, history and identity and an extremely interesting insight into a forgotten slice of recent history, it's less than truly memorable.

CAST: Moshe Agazai, Mosche Abebe, Sirak M Sabahat, Yael Abecassis, Roschdy Zem, Roni Hadar, Yitzhak Edgar
DIRECTOR: Radu Mihaileanu
RUNNING TIME: 149 minutes
RATING: M
SCREENING: Bridgeway
VERDICT: A polished, though episodic, drama about an Ethiopian refugee who masquerades as a Jew to emigrate to Israel is a potent meditation on history and identity, hampered only by an unevenness of pace.