Installing themselves in a friend’s Tel Aviv apartment while he is in Italy making cheese, a young American couple, Kyle (Thomas Dekker) and Eva (Haley Bennett), take in the city’s sights, enjoy its occasionally louche nightlife and attempt to work on their respective artistic projects. The implausibly hard-drinking, sexually ambiguous Kyle is an experimental film-maker, smirkingly pitching his style as ‘Stan Brakhage meets Kenneth Anger’. The elegant Eva, with a fondness for vintage-style clothing that extends into the bedroom, is a poet whose modest hesitancy about her own work owes much to Kyle’s dominating presence.

When they meet Avi, a handsome would-be actor recently out of the Israeli army and casting about for a job in the country’s troubled economy, the first sparks of mutual attraction fly between him and Eva. However it is Kyle, characteristically enough, who pursues Avi, at first as a performer in his film, and later as an object of desire. Though Eva has found her own distractions, she can hardly fail to be unaware of Kyle and Avi’s growing closeness…

For much of its length THE WHITE CITY loosely follows both Kyle and Eva as they navigate Tel Aviv together and separately. However, at times it feels more like ‘The Kyle Show’ (a perception which the character himself would no doubt applaud): a twisted, polymorphously perverse rom-com where Kyle has to choose, or chooses not to choose, between Eva and Avi. (The similarity of their names can hardly be a coincidence.) In fact, after a moment of apparent danger when he first appears, Avi proves little more than a biddable, easily-pleased plaything: not much more than the human statue Kyle’s film turns him into. The real heart of the film – always assuming it contains so sentimental an organ – is the relationship between Kyle and Eva. The idea of a couple whose relationship is tested by a journey to a foreign country is a regular cinematic theme, from Rossellini’s VOYAGE TO ITALY in 1954 to Roger Michell’s LE WEEK-END last year; but this couple is so young, and their relationship so short-lived, that they really have no business already being quite this bored with each other. While neither of them can claim to be exactly sympathetic, Kyle – self-centred, manipulative, unscrupulous and just plain rude – is outstandingly unpleasant; and Dekker plays him with such reality (not to mention relish) that he would probably be advised to steer clear of people who have just seen the film, just in case they feel the need to punch him in the face.

Kyle’s carefully maintained carapace of anaesthetised irony briefly cracks…

As often with such clearly unbalanced relationships, the film’s unspoken question is why the more hard-done-by partner, in this case Eva, doesn’t get out. But then, Eva has her own secret weapon: if Kyle is unpredictable because of his wilfully arbitrary nature, Eva proves equally so through her sheer inscrutability. While she knows exactly how to get a rise out of him through small actions – her insistence on smoking, for instance, or her indulgence of her lesbian friend’s indiscreet admiration – he cannot really tell which of his daily outrages will finally make her lose her cool. When she finally does so, Kyle’s carefully maintained carapace of anaesthetised irony briefly cracks, and it is a testament to Dekker’s performance that this moment of sorrowful repentance proves so persuasive.

The relationship is not all play-acting, however, and Eva is clearly uneasy with aspects of it, allowing herself to charm and be charmed by a sad-eyed Israeli poet who so expertly mingles flirtation with genuine interest that Eva cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. As it turns out, she enjoys being lionised by the poet and his friends only long enough for it to annoy Kyle, whereupon she meekly follows him home.

If this makes the film sound too much like a grim ‘relationship’ drama, it should be better understood as a dark comedy of manners. The film is often unmistakably humorous – as with the revelation of Kyle and Eva’s absent landlord’s activities in Italy – and the two leads bring a naturalistic ease to their characters’ often bantering relationship. Bennett has been perfecting her particular brand of zen incomprehension since her engaging debut as a bubblegum pop princess in WORDS AND MUSIC, and it stands her in good stead here. Dekker, looking more like a debauched faun than ever, displays an unexpected aptitude for Kyle’s spiteful comedy. Like Falstaff (whom he resembles only in this, and of course in his prodigious intake of alcohol), Kyle is both cattily witty in himself and an object of mirth in others – in this case, the co-directors Tanner King Barklow and Gil Kofman (working from a screenplay by Barklow), who cherish his crass callousness, his unsubtle lechery, his blithe indifference to the day-to-day problems of ordinary Israelis.

As for Kyle and Eva’s artistic endeavours, Barklow and Kofman seem to suggest that they are of little consequence: certainly not enough to justify Kyle’s unpleasant behaviour (assuming anything could). After an argument with Kyle, Eva turns a moment of mild insight into the slightest of poems, recited no less than twice to a audience of Israeli literati whose appreciation is rendered entirely ambiguous by the film-makers. (Are they impressed? Are they mocking her? Are they just horny?) In Kyle’s case, it may be significant that the lushly saturated video he takes while out and about in Tel Aviv is rendered monochrome when he starts editing it on his laptop.

One disadvantage of a film like this that focuses so strongly on character at the expense of plot is that it is difficult to bring it to a conclusion. However, while the film’s abrupt ending – owing more than a little to The Sopranos – may baffle or annoy, it is perhaps better read as a sign that Barklow and Kofman know exactly how much rope to give their characters to let them hang themselves, and they go on filming until it runs out.

Meet the director Gil Kofman at both showings of THE WHITE CITY, which screens on 29th Aug at 16.00 and 31 Aug at 13.30 at the Cambridge Film Festival.

Gil Kofman attended last year’s Film Festival with his documentary UNMADE IN CHINA – see the trailer below.

httpvh://youtu.be/fOcZDzhLLRI