“Show, don’t tell” is one of the basic tenets of storytelling, and for good reason. Few things are more irritating than a script that makes it characters say things like “John is so charismatic,” or “Jane is really dedicated to her job,” but skips the part where these character traits are actually demonstrated. It’s a pretty basic mistake, and too many films are guilty of it. That said, Hagar Ben-Asher’s The Slut is the first film I’ve seen that makes this mistake not only when putting across character traits, but also most of the story’s plot points. I realize that part of being a Serious Film Fan is appreciating movies that don’t spoon feed you everything, but The Slut leaves so much unexplained that it almost asks you to just write the movie yourself. Call me a philistine, but I don’t think that’s my job.The slut of the title is Tamar (played by writer-director Ben-Asher), a single mother of two daughters living in a small village in Israel. Tamar carries on multiple sexual relationships with various men in the village. (We see too little of the village to determine if she is literally the only woman in it, but it kind of seems that way.) These relationships seem benignly casual, even business-like. No mention is made of her daughters’ father, nor is a reason given for his absence from their lives. One day, Tamar runs into Shai (Ishai Golan) a man she knows, but hasn’t seen in years. We know this not from a familiar-but-awkward tone to their conversation, or from expressions of recognition on their faces. We know it because Tamar says, “I haven’t seen you in years.” Nothing else about their history is ever offered to the audience – not through dialogue, not through visual clues, not through acting.Within a couple of scenes, they appear to be in a serious relationship. He’s staying over a lot and hanging out with her kids, and Tamar appears to have stopped schtupping other guys. And then some fairly dramatic things happen. But every single one of them happens offscreen – we only know they happened because characters tell us about them. Instead of showing us plot points as they occur, Ben-Asher chooses to shoot long, frequently silent sequences of characters doing mundane things. Tamar tends to the chickens she raises. Shai drives Tamar’s daughters to school. Shai and Tamar are laying in bed together, when suddenly Tamar rolls over and says, “Oh, hey, something potentially life-altering happened today. Thought you should know.”This technique could be interesting if the performances were really good. Unfortunately, Ben-Asher’s performance as Tamar is too bland to rise above the murky plot, and fails to portray much more than what’s already on the page (which, again, is almost nothing). Golan fares better as her improbably earnest love interest, but still leaves too much blank.The Slut bumps up against potentially rich and complex topics – single parenthood, the morality of promiscuity, the promises and challenges of monogamy, and the way these issues take on extra weight when you live in an isolated area where everyone knows each other. But it refuses to wholeheartedly delve into any of them, or even to flesh out its half-formed ideas by offering specifics about the people who are supposed to be living them. The final moment of the film is an aerial shot, looking straight down on our two leads from a great distance. That pretty much sums up the problem with this movie. I wanted to be down on the ground with Tamar and Shai, not squinting at them from an excessive aesthetic remove.
“Show, don’t tell” is one of the basic tenets of storytelling, and for good reason. Few things are more irritating than a script that makes it characters say things like “John is so charismatic,” or “Jane is really dedicated to her job,” but skips the part where these character traits are actually demonstrated. It’s a pretty basic mistake, and too many films are guilty of it. That said, Hagar Ben-Asher’s The Slut is the first film I’ve seen that makes this mistake not only when putting across character traits, but also most of the story’s plot points. I realize that part of being a Serious Film Fan is appreciating movies that don’t spoon feed you everything, but The Slut leaves so much unexplained that it almost asks you to just write the movie yourself. Call me a philistine, but I don’t think that’s my job.The slut of the title is Tamar (played by writer-director Ben-Asher), a single mother of two daughters living in a small village in Israel. Tamar carries on multiple sexual relationships with various men in the village. (We see too little of the village to determine if she is literally the only woman in it, but it kind of seems that way.) These relationships seem benignly casual, even business-like. No mention is made of her daughters’ father, nor is a reason given for his absence from their lives. One day, Tamar runs into Shai (Ishai Golan) a man she knows, but hasn’t seen in years. We know this not from a familiar-but-awkward tone to their conversation, or from expressions of recognition on their faces. We know it because Tamar says, “I haven’t seen you in years.” Nothing else about their history is ever offered to the audience – not through dialogue, not through visual clues, not through acting.Within a couple of scenes, they appear to be in a serious relationship. He’s staying over a lot and hanging out with her kids, and Tamar appears to have stopped schtupping other guys. And then some fairly dramatic things happen. But every single one of them happens offscreen – we only know they happened because characters tell us about them. Instead of showing us plot points as they occur, Ben-Asher chooses to shoot long, frequently silent sequences of characters doing mundane things. Tamar tends to the chickens she raises. Shai drives Tamar’s daughters to school. Shai and Tamar are laying in bed together, when suddenly Tamar rolls over and says, “Oh, hey, something potentially life-altering happened today. Thought you should know.”This technique could be interesting if the performances were really good. Unfortunately, Ben-Asher’s performance as Tamar is too bland to rise above the murky plot, and fails to portray much more than what’s already on the page (which, again, is almost nothing). Golan fares better as her improbably earnest love interest, but still leaves too much blank.The Slut bumps up against potentially rich and complex topics – single parenthood, the morality of promiscuity, the promises and challenges of monogamy, and the way these issues take on extra weight when you live in an isolated area where everyone knows each other. But it refuses to wholeheartedly delve into any of them, or even to flesh out its half-formed ideas by offering specifics about the people who are supposed to be living them. The final moment of the film is an aerial shot, looking straight down on our two leads from a great distance. That pretty much sums up the problem with this movie. I wanted to be down on the ground with Tamar and Shai, not squinting at them from an excessive aesthetic remove.
