Wonderfully offbeat film!

Waste of Money.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

This film starts slow, ends slow, and except for an interesting, symbolic ending and a lot of driving in the Middle East, doesn't really go anywhere. As a movie, its metaphorical messages are too familiar by half.The film opens with a single-shot, non-stop, ten (that's TEN) minutes showing the Israeli-American Rebecca (Natalie Portman) in profile, weeping voluminously because she has broken up with her boyfriend and feels alone and lost in Israel, the country of her birth. We don't have five minutes (even that would be too much); we have an agonizing TEN minutes: wholly one-ninth of the entire film. Director Amos Gitai has made some great films, but he can also be one of the most irritating big-name directors in the world. He doesn't disappoint with this one: the irritation keeps piling up. Only he knows why he makes these peculiar choices in his films. There are long, longggg swaths of often poorly written dialogue, spoken in extreme close-ups in a claustrophobic taxi (symbolism again) driven by the terrific Israeli actress Hana Laszlo, who plays Hanna, a woman who must visit the Free Zone in Jordan to claim $30,000 owed to her husband by a Palestinian. The dialogue doesn't propel the plot, because there is no plot. It's instead a film about outsiders such as Portman trying to understand the age-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. She comes away in predictable futility, because, according to Gitai, although she was born in Israel, she didn't stay there. That's the key difference. This is a very long 90-minute film that doesn't tell us very much, except: (a) Israelis and Palestinians just cannot get along; and (b) absentee or non-Israelis/Palestinians cannot begin to understand the conflict. That, essentially, is what this film is 'about'. And enter the problem: didn't we already know that? Isn't this just a little twist on something we've already seen more than a few times before?

When I saw the beginning of the film begins with more than 10 minutes of Natalie crying in a passenger seat, while nothing is happening, I knew this film will be a very boring film, but I kept watching it, and I made a mistake! The film is a 15 minutes film dragged into 90 minute film, when most of the time nothing is happening, it is not that the film is slow, just things don't move, beside the car they are driving. The director did a very good job of annoying me, he just made a joke of the middle east conflict with a shallow, meaning less story. I am a big fan of art movies, and I am not a Hollywood movie fan, but this Free Zone is not an art movie, and even it is not a Hollywood movie. What I don't understand is how can this film win any awards and even be nominated, especially in Cannes Film Festival. Was the actors so bad in that year that Hana Laszlo won the best Best Actress in Cannes Film Festival? For half of the film she was driving with no expressions or dialog, and even when she spoke she was not convincing. All the actors beside Makram Khoury and Natalie Portman (she was not brilliant) were really bad! But I would say the worst of them all is the director, I did not see any other film he did, but if all his films are like this one, then he should start doing something else!Sorry if my English is not perfect!

My husband and I waited for months to see this film of DVD and when we finally got it and watched it we were terribly disappointed. The film is about as shallow and politically loaded as watching an episode of Studio 60. The three main female leads are hollow, with the exception being Hannah Lazlo, but even her performance feels forced and 1-dimensional, as if someone told her ahead of time she'd win an award for taking on this role. Truthfully, the movie's start with Natalie Portman crying in a car and her mascara running down her face for 10 minutes to Chava Alberstein's Had Gadya wasn't a highlight either.Advice to those seeking a good, emotionally charged, culturally deeper Israeli film: Broken Wings.

This is more of a response to the latest post by "Mrnaturalsez". I guess we are expected to take your word on a movie instead of the Cannes Film Festival and the Toronto Film Festival, which incidentally gave this move high praise. The film was an interesting, raw look at Jerusalem and Jordan as one would see it as a traveller. Plot has nothing to do with appreciating this movie, so I think you missed the mark. The story was used as a reason to explore the middle eastern culture. It was also interesting seeing Natalie Portman speak in her native Hebrew language. The film drew upon Portman's real life, as she was born in Isreal and had a Jewish father and American mother. Some films are watched for action, others for art, but I guess one will believe what one wants. There's my 2 cents.