Sasson Gabai and Asi Levi in ‘Bliss.’ Courtesy of Israel Film Festival
By Dan Friedman
June 4, 2025
Near the end of Shemi Zarhin’s latest movie, Efi (Asi Levi) is onstage at the community center where she teaches music. She is introducing her adult students’ Hanukkah concert when, still in full control of her faculties, she finds herself suddenly and inexplicably, incapable of finishing her sentence explaining what motivates her — or anyone. “We all put in the work because…” she starts off confidently, before tailing off. It’s a remarkable gap and it is a fall to silence that lies at the heart of Zarhin’s Bliss (Hemda in Hebrew). What, in the end, keeps anyone going?
Filmed before the events of Oct. 7, 2023, Bliss is a timely reminder that life in Israel — and life in general — is more than just current events and war in Gaza. Though set in the North of Israel, ostensibly away from the conflict, many of the landmark buildings of the film have since been destroyed in the war. More important than its tangential relation to the news, though, is its artistic impact. Zarhin, long regarded as one of Israeli cinema’s most emotionally astute directors, has produced a tender, complex and mature work that, despite its counterweight of constant tragedy, always stays on the optimistic side of wry irony.
The movie centers on Efi and Sassy (Sasson Gabai from Rambo III, Shtisel, and The Band’s Visit) whose tough, leathery love is abundant: both stated and understated.. Indeed, at the movie’s opening it is explicitly avowed despite Sassy’s impotence after his prostate surgery. Their relationship is a second marriage for Sassy (now in his 70s) who, after the tragic death of his son’s wife, married her best friend. Efi (now in her 50s), for her part, also had an extramarital and intergenerational affair that comes back to haunt her during the events of the film.
Known for intimate family dramas like Aviva My Love, The Kind Words, and The World Is Funny, Zarhin again explores the fault lines of domestic life. Including those three films, he has worked a lot with both Levi and Gabai, and brings them together for the first time in the nearly 20 years since Aviva My Love. This time because the vantage point is that of a slightly older couple, the landscape includes more historical perspectives. Sassy’s actions suggest a sense of guilt that things are not better, while both Efi and Sassy maintain a constant sense of what might have been as they negotiate the emotional and financial debts that stand in the way of a comfortable retirement.
The film is framed by the unheralded visit of Omri (the dreamily sexy Ma’or Levi), Sassy’s grandson. He is a cherubic 20-year-old who lives in practical exile with his compulsive gambler father Dror in Belgium. He arrives from the airport on a mysterious motorbike — owned by “a friend.” That friend turns out to be Noga, Omri’s lover. Chancing upon the young lovers playing house in his own house, Sassy watches through the window — delighted by their innocent play and turning away before his gaze becomes prurient.
Omri also joins his grandfather on his job driving a recycling truck. To reinforce the sense of Omri’s overflowing love (for his grandfather, for his father, for Noga, for the food that he eats with gusto), he celebrates his return to the country by rolling about with his friend Hamid, Sassy’s young Arab co-worker, as if they were two puppies. As always with Zarhin, the presence of Arabic in Israeli-Jewish patois is absolutely normal. As an Arab Jew from Baghdad, Gabai is perfectly fluent, and the Arabic interactions are, though on one pointed occasion rebuffed, organic and intimate. He and Omri call and respond with Hebrew and Arabic love poetry, presumably from Omri’s early childhood.
Unsurprisingly, too, for a Zarhin film, the production of food also has a strong cameo role, embodying the labors of love that people do for one another. When, for Hanukkah, the family gathers at the home of Sassy’s first wife, the crucial question is who made the doughnuts. They have come together for a family meal with Sassy’s daughter and her family in attendance and his spoiled granddaughter Neta finds the answer, of course, unsatisfying. The channels of 21st century interaction can never deliver her enough love.
Efi and Sassy regularly transform their small apartment into a cottage factory for the production of stuffed pasta shells. Though he cannot directly feed his absent son Dror, Sassy can sell his food (for a premium over factory made pasta) to make money to pay back Dror’s gambling debts. As with so many actions throughout Bliss there is no smooth transmission and love goes unappreciated. Not only does Dror not get the food, but the quality is wasted on the consumers. As various people joke, this deluxe stuffed luxury pasta goes to folk who can’t tell whether it is even, in fact, stuffed with the advertised spinach mixture.
As the de facto responsible adults, Efi and Sassy find themselves working several jobs to pay off Dror’s mob debts, while watching his grandchildren suffer from psychological and financial trauma. Neta seems a thoroughly unpleasant teen girl until we realize how thoroughly brutalized she is by social media. Her arguments with her mother spill over into her quiet, younger brother who misunderstands what they say and, in one episode, Sassy has to help him pass a coin he has swallowed to prevent iron-deficiency.
Bliss is a profound account of what it is to continue the hard work of living and loving in the wake of illness, disappointment and missteps — which is to say, of living with humanity. Zarhin cinematically paraphrases Samuel Beckett’s famous quotation from The Unnamable, “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” Because, even at the darkest time of the year, Hanukkah’s miracle of lights illuminates and gives hope. Even if they are not able to express it within the film, Sassy and Efi do what they do to redeem Omri from his task of minding Dror, to free him to live his loving, innocent life. And the secret of their love is that hope and sharing in this hard task, too, despite its difficulty, brings them some bliss.
Bliss is the closing night feature of The Israel Film Center Festival which runs from June 5-12, www.israelfilmcenter.org/festival.
