One Week and a Day

An impressive and confident debut feature written and directed by Asaph Polonsky, One Week and a Day is a hard-to-categorize comic drama concerning two individuals who cope with grief in starkly different ways. Set in Israel and beginning in the first hour after a week of sitting shiva—a period of mourning following the death of a loved one—the story finds middle-aged married couple Eyal (Shai Avivi) and his wife Vicky (Jenya Dodina) starting on the difficult path to resume normal life after their 25-year-old son Ronnie dies. Of course, there is no timetable for grief, and people deal with devastating loss in various ways. Vicky wraps up things at home and at the cemetery with a frozen expression of weary determination. A schoolteacher, she also shows up unexpectedly at work, causing a minor flap when she tries to oust a substitute who has already begun class. For Eyal, however, grief is more like an episode of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm. Instead of going to the cemetery, Eyal claims that he needs to guard their home from thieves who track obituary notices and target houses that are likely to be empty while mourners are out. Eyal also goes to the hospice where Ronnie died (and retrieves his son's medical marijuana, prompting a later scene in which he struggles to roll a joint for the first time in his life), gets into a conflict with a taxi driver, and tries (unsuccessfully) to hide in the bushes when his neighbors show up with a salad. And Eyal has some unlikely and sometimes hilarious adventures with twentysomething goofball Zooler (Tomer Kapon). Eyal and Vicky's geometrically fascinating house essentially plays another character, as the director uses glass doors, bedrooms, a foyer, and a backyard to reflect a heavy emptiness that is also laced with farce. Capturing both the comedy and tragedy of life, this is highly recommended. (T. Keogh)