One Week and a Day is the sort of low-stakes, crowd-pleasing dramedy that the film industry has churned out with an assembly-line-like efficiency for the past decade. The characters are easily-recognizable, the premise establishes an unusual social situation and there is enough pathos (laughing and crying) to keep audiences involved. There is a dash of audacity sprinkled in, particularly in the third act, but for the most part first-time director Asaph Polonsky steers straight and stays under the speed limit with this one.
The premise for One Week and a Day involves a mourning middle-aged couple, Eyal (Shai Avivi) and Vicky (Evgenia Dodina), who formulate diametrically-opposed responses to the death by cancer of their adult son, Ronnie. Vicky is a teacher who hurriedly re-immerses herself in her normal routine following the end of the shiva for Ronnie, going to work, for a run and to the dentist. She is the more engaging character, but Eyal is the film’s protagonist. Eyal abandons his usual tasks and obligations after the shiva, stealing Ronnie’s remaining medical marijuana and returning multiple times to Ronnie’s hospice facility. Eyal aimlessly avoids responsibility, while Vicky instead pointedly immerses herself in it.
The strength of One Week and a Day’s script lies in a handful of set pieces, which are then tediously connected by various narrative strands to make a coherent plot. Any claim this film has to humor or tear-jerking comes in these standout set-piece moments, including Eyal’s catastrophic efforts at rolling a joint, the translation of air-guitar to air-surgery in a touching scene and the funeral proceedings for a random stranger into which Eyal stumbles near the film’s conclusion. These are fun, novel and were clearly the center of gravity for both the director and the actors as they set about the task of making the film.
Unfortunately, One Week and a Day bogs down in the process of transitioning from one set piece to the next. It is a slog getting Eyal to his kitchen table with some weed and rolling papers and even more laborious to have him at the cemetery where he crashes the funeral. In the myriad transitional scenes, watching the film is a real chore, as the characters are not charismatic or involving enough to demand empathy and engagement; they are less developed than they are shuttled from set piece to set piece.
Polonsky makes half-hearted efforts towards breaking out of the straightforward framework of One Week and a Day at select moments, but these unsuccessful attempts at directorial flourish are ultimately confounding. During the funeral scene, for instance, the film digresses to a flashback involving the eulogy speaker—a previously unknown character in the film—who vainly works to remove bird shit from his car. This narrative elision seems to be geared towards some kind of far-reaching allegory, but the metaphor does not come off. There are other efforts at such allegorizing throughout; the rudeness of other Israelis who are just trying to go about their workaday lives seems, for instance, to be positing a thesis about suburban life or Israeli society, but that thesis is at best half-baked.
Where Polonsky is more successful in making One Week and a Day more than just another independent slice-of-life dramedy is the cinematography. The framing throughout the film is just a bit off-kilter, with characters regularly placed on the far left or right of the screen, a visual representation that Eyal and Vicky are still not quite right. Even here, the attempted flourishes do not work, as can be seen during Vicky’s dental appointment when the camera quite jarringly zips in-and-out and all around the office for extreme close-ups and odd angles. This abandonment of the visual style of the film is bewildering, rather than effective in communicating whatever message is intended.
One Week and a Day is a steady film, more quotidian than exciting, with characters who never really come together, but with a half-dozen worthwhile set-piece situations that keep just enough energy in the script to give it some life.
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