Moshe Rosenthal’s ‘Tell Me Everything’ brings a powerful coming-of-age story to Israeli theaters

Moshe Rosenthal’s Tell Me Everything (with the Hebrew title Atzmaut, "Independence"), which opens in theaters throughout Israel on Thursday, is a moving, coming-of-age drama that tells a story that is different from anything we’ve seen before. It’s not a surprise that it was nominated for a record-breaking 16 Ophir Awards and is likely to take home quite a few of them when the awards are given out on September 9.

Rosenthal knows how to tell a story and create distinctive characters, which he proved in his first feature, Karaoke, an offbeat look at how a bored, long-married couple are shaken up when a seductive stranger enters their lives, which won Best Actor and Best Actress Ophir Awards for its stars, Sasson Gabay and Rita Shukrun, and praise for Lior Ashkenazi as their new neighbor.

Tell Me Everything, which had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival this year, the first Israeli feature film to be shown there in years, is also a portrait of an unconventional family, featuring compelling performances by the ensemble cast.

It opens in 1987, as 12-year-old Boaz (Yair Mazor) prepares for his bar mitzvah. His family lives in a cramped apartment where he shares a room with his two older sisters (Mor Dimri and Neta Orbach), and he often feels left out around them.

His mother, Bella (Keren Tzur), works as a beautician, but she seems to be a frustrated actress and is something of a drama queen in the family. She is oddly close to and intimate with Boaz, and it is he, and not Meir (Assi Cohen), her husband, that she calls when she wants a neck massage.

A family shattered by fear and hidden truths

Meir is jovial, and Boaz loves being around him, but there is tension in the household because his furniture business is going under, and Bella is furious. There are other tensions in their relationship that Boaz cannot begin to understand.

But Boaz gets a horrifying glimpse into the source of this tension when he stumbles upon his father engaged in sex with another man in the dressing room of the public pool where the whole family goes. At first, he doesn’t say anything, but he is frightened and tormented by reports he hears on the news about the AIDS epidemic, which was then at its height and which disproportionately affected gay men. Is his father dying? Will the whole family be infected?

Finally, he confides in his sisters about what he saw. Having perhaps sensed the problems between their parents, they come up with a plan to find out what is really going on: They will follow their father to what they suspect - and what turns out to be - an assignation with a man. When they tell their mother what they have seen, the family is destroyed, and for close to a decade, Boaz has no contact with his father.

The final third of the movie features Boaz as a young adult, now played by Ido Tako. Boaz works in a gas station to support his mother, who still can’t seem to get her act together, and he is fiercely homophobic. As he dreams of studying psychology and finally getting out of the house, a series of events takes place that makes it easier for him to find a way back to Meir.

A complex and unusual story

It’s a complex and unusual story that creates a sympathetic portrait of its confused, frightened hero, and it’s particularly good in the scenes when Boaz is younger. If you lived through those early years of the AIDS epidemic, when there was great fear and too much misinformation about the transmission of the disease, you will find it easy to relate to this boy, who has to deal with issues that terrified adults.

At times, the screenplay is a little heavy-handed, and I guessed what was coming and how it would be presented more often than I would have liked. But there were also wonderful moments, such as when the sisters shriek with joy, even in the middle of the grim outing to spy on their father, when the “quiet song” they love, Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All,” comes on the radio.

While the movie may seem autobiographical, Rosenthal has said that it isn’t; rather, it is a story that he came up with while he was reflecting on his own coming out as a gay man. The fact that it seems as if it must be his personal story speaks well of its authenticity.

The movie shares several themes with the recently released movie Just An Illusion by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, about a French boy preparing for his bar mitzvah and trying to understand his parents better, but Tell Me Everything is different by introducing the gay theme and the essentially tragic story it tells.

The actors are all good, but Yair Mazor, who is making his movie debut, and veteran actor Assi Cohen, who is returning to the big screen after working mostly in television for years, are the standouts. These two actors seem to have a real, warm rapport in their scenes together, and when the family falls apart, you feel the tragedy more sharply because you understand what both of them are losing.