Once in Israel. The boys who broke up on vacation, jokingly, played out a strange passerby who wandered around the block, presenting himself as a mediator in search of the creation of marriage couples, who turned out to be a friend of Arika’s father, who started with his friends that brazen deception, which, having opened up, initiated the work that was proposed to the inventor by an innocuous person who forced the young man to go down to the “Lower City” from the height of his idealistic heavens, immersed in the confusion of feelings and desires, his own body, decisions of loved ones and very distant people.
The father’s decision to release his son with a half-forgotten friend from the pre-war childhood of another country, without digging into the truth of his real life and without finding out the secrets of his mysterious work, allowing the teenager to disappear all day with no one knows who, hiding from his parents an increasingly addictive passion for the explorer and interpreter of human souls.
Having become a full-time informant, and simply a spy of the lame pimp Yankele by the name of Bride (Bride?), who did not cross the threshold of sixteen years, the timid Arik plunged into a series of daily meetings and observations, mandatory and accompanying, for old friends and temporary guests, in the circle of his comrades and surrounded by a crafty master, organizer of marital ties.
Using the tried-and-tested formula of the “last summer of childhood”, the director becomes an observer of the observer, after that, bringing what he saw with notes that make up his cinematic novel, turning a multidimensional look into the historical truth of the Holocaust, revealing behind the pain of survivors the prejudices of those who do not believe in their honest life, revealing to the hero the book world of Ka-Tsetnik’s “Doll House”, superimposed on the questions of inconsistency of his new meetings, giving rise to doubts and conclusions, determining his place in his internal conflicts.
Sexual maturity is paralleled by the maturity of the adult choice that the young filler has to make at every step, getting acquainted with the friends of the strict Yankele, the lonely beauty Clara and enterprising Lilliputians, for whom a personal question is relevant, as it is relevant for Arika himself, who fell madly in love with the obstinate American Tamara, who threatens to break his friendship with a friend with a story about their happy night.
Arika’s summer discoveries reveal long-standing fears and fears that persist within Jewish society, ambiguous perception of history and discrepancies in the memory of terrible and painful times, details of sociocultural scale break down into elements of individual self-identification in the moral and ethical environment of peers and older friends, allowing the young man to make a breakthrough in the moral comprehension of the experience that brought him a chance meeting with a passer-by who gave him more than a silent father.
Fairly awarded Adir Miller, causes sincere surprise by the power of the image created by him of a master sage hiding under the guise of a cunning breeder of failed wives and husbands: “I give you what you need, not what you want”, revealing to an honest boy the psychology and motivation of human actions, allowing him to make independent decisions, appreciating the sanity of his assistant, not afraid to stand up for his rightness.
Short pants, mandatory T-shirts and sandals on the bare foot do not detract from the cold-blooded exposure that goes on the role of Tuval Shafir, put in the center of attention of the camera, immediately switching from the general plan to the faces of the characters, withstanding pauses of thoughtfulness and minutes of movements, consciousness, bodies, hands, lips and different hearts.
Beginning with the end and a little confused at the beginning, the picture of Avi Nesher (literally translated from Hebrew called “Once I was...”), obscured from adversity by the comic circumstances of inscrutable marriage routes, grows up with the Israeli realities of the turbulent sixties with the dust of smoky eras and broken destinies hovering in them on the example of one, young, who, straightened up, took a step forward.