Sometimes it takes a complete break with one’s past in order to bring about a new way of living. Sudden dramatic changes in habitual circumstance tend to send one careening off into heretofore unthought of trajectories of being in the world. If we’re lucky, it can even lead to unexpected growth. For Victor and Raya Frankel, the elderly couple at the heart of Evgeny Ruman’s wonderfully warm and comedic Golden Voices, that break with the past comes with the dramatic collapse of the Soviet Union and their decision to accept Israel’s invitation towards those nations’ Jewish residents to come back home to their ancestral land.
Arriving in the mid-sized city of Rishon LeZion in 1990 with little more than the clothes they are wearing and a hope for a better life, the Frankels were minor celebrities of a sort back in Russia, big fish in the little pond of the community of voice-over actors who made their living dubbing foreign language films (at least those approved by the Soviet authorities) into Russian. Victor (Vladimir Friedman), proud and stubborn, is determined to recreate what he once had. When a trip to a one-time agent friend of his fails to produce results, he is forced to take a job as a pamphleteer, distributing informational fliers to his local community as preparation for Saddam Hussein’s inevitable rocket attacks. Eventually he stumbles into re-engaging with his past career when he comes upon a dodgy little bootlegging operation run by Irina (Nadia Kucher) and Shurik (Vitali Voskoboinkov), a hilarious pair of ne’er do wells whose business caters to the newly arrived influx of Russian-speaking citizens who just want to be able to see Die Hard and Home Alone in a language they can better understand. Victor has loftier ideas, however; he’s determined to introduce Fellini films to the masses.
Meanwhile, Raya (a luminous Maria Belkin) answers a want-ad looking for a woman with a mellifluous voice for a phone-related job, which turns out to be a phone sex call center run by Dvora (Evelin Hagoel), a tough-but-maternal mentor who agrees to give the job to the 62-year-old Raya due to her preternaturally “golden” voice. At first inhibited and embarrassed, Raya soon comes into her own, thriving in a role where she is able to create and inhabit other personae rather than parroting the pre-recorded lines of other actors’ parts as she once did. Her new-found freedom from her husband’s director-like control over their mutual storyline leads her to engage in an ill-considered but ultimately enlivening emotional enmeshment with a favored client of hers, with dramatic results.
The gently humanistic script by Ruman and co-writer/director-of-photography Ziv Berkovich is wonderfully specific in its details, obviously coming from a place of deep familiarity with the milieu and the people of this time and place. “In the particular is contained the universal,” and so the carefully considered choices made in the art direction, wardrobe, locations, etc., help to open up and humanize what might have otherwise been a rather niche story, foreign to most viewers’ lived experiences. All of the actors are good, but Friedman and especially Belkin are absolutely terrific. Many viewers may be unfamiliar with these seasoned professionals, and their work here should inspire the curious to seek out both of their past work as soon as possible.
Ultimately, Golden Voices is a funny and emotional rumination on the art of acting, both in terms of cinema and of our day-to-day lives; and how it sometimes requires a rupture with our pasts in order to shake us out of our predetermined courses and towards a more fulfilling and mutually satisfying engagement with the future.
Photo courtesy of Music Box Films
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