Six years ago, Ari Nesher, the teenage son of Israeli director Avi Nesher, was killed in a hit-and-run accident, while riding an electric bicycle. He died on his 17th birthday. The case attracted international attention at the time not only because the victim — a promising artistic soul with several short films already to his name — was the child of a celebrity, but because the driver was apparently famous as well. Newspapers reported the arrest and trial of a Premier League soccer player, who served time but was never convicted of manslaughter.
A sexy, modern and uncommonly introspective debut feature from Ari Nesher’s sister, Tom, “Come Closer” does the work of confronting this tragedy, but not in the way you might expect: The film opens with charismatic young Nati (Ido Tako) nearly getting run over on a bike. In this telling, however, the boy escapes that accident unscathed, only to be abducted by friends and hauled to the beach for a surprise birthday party, orchestrated by a dazzling young woman (Lia Elalouf) with ruby red hair and iridescent splashes of color at the inner corner of each eye.
Audiences may not immediately recognize this sultry and seductive figure, named Eden, as the character’s sister, since the dynamic between these two characters comes across as too comfortable for lovers, but also too intimate for siblings. Eden and Nati are so close, they could almost be twins. When this night of revelry abruptly ends, with a slightly intoxicated Nati sneaking off into the night, only to be sideswiped by a car while crossing the road, the incredible vacuum left by his death is immediately felt.
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It’s a brutal way to begin a movie — by sparing the boy’s life, only to snuff it out a few minutes later — but worth noting that writer-director Tom Nesher spends no part of what follows going after the driver or otherwise seeking justice. “Come Closer” takes a far more unpredictable course, delving into Eden’s psyche as she tries to process her grief in ways no one but Nesher herself would presume to depict.
In the next few scenes, the filmmaker shows Eden acting out, wearing her dead brother’s clothes and sneaking out to go clubbing, in hopes that the music might distract from her pain. Instead, she imagines Nati across from her on the dance floor, his silhouette flickering among the strobe lights. Simply put, Eden can’t escape the memory of Nati, and it doesn’t help that her lover (a married father-to-be, played by Yaakov Zada-Daniel) is unavailable when she needs him most.
And then comes the movie’s make-or-break discovery: Going through her brother’s social media posts, Eden learns that he had been seeing someone named Maya, a shy and relatively plain-looking 16-year-old (Daria Rosen) unknown to the family. Turns out, Maya was the one Nati was seen discreetly texting the night of his death — suggesting that each might have reason to blame the other for what happened. If any such resentment occurs to them, it goes entirely unspoken until the film’s shock climax, which takes the two young women’s feelings to a startling extreme.
Along the way, Nesher maps a fresh and provocative personal arc, as Eden insists upon getting as close to her beloved brother’s equally beloved girlfriend as possible, even crossing into uncharted queer territory. Early on, it’s hard for Eden to believe that Nati could have developed such an intense connection with anyone else — much less someone so square — since that would seem to violate a childhood pact, forged amid their parents’ divorce, whereby the siblings swore that their relationship would always come first.
What starts with a kind of curiosity on Eden’s part quickly escalates, as she takes the earnest young Maya under her wing. But just because Eden is older does not necessarily mean she’s more mature. In the end, it’s one of the film’s strengths that Nesher is tough on her onscreen proxy, depicting her as both a radiant “it girl” and an imperfect emotional wreck. (Meanwhile, Nesher seems somewhat blind to the self-absorbed character’s privilege, focusing instead on all the ways the world has been unfair to her.)
Casting Elalouf as Eden does much of the work: With her magnetic eye makeup, the radiant star gives off early Gwyneth Paltrow vibes, crossed with the lively, mercurial spirit of a young Angelina Jolie (circa “Playing by Heart”). Maya describes Eden’s palpable allure as “sparkle” — evidently, Nati had it too — a quality that reads loud and clear to audiences. Frankly, it must, or else how to explain why Maya, who was ready to marry Eden’s brother, would tumble into such a destabilizing homoerotic infatuation with his sister?
If certain aspects of “Come Closer” feel naive, those are balanced by a bold contemporary take on its young characters, whose attraction needn’t be defined by old-fashioned labels. This isn’t your typical queer film, where it matters whether the two girls are “gay” or not. The bond Eden and Maya share is their way of doing as the title suggests: trying to reestablish a link with the absent Nati, where each becomes a stand-in for the missing young man. It’s an experiment that’s doomed to fail for both of them, but one well worth exploring.
Along the way, Nesher establishes herself as an exciting new voice (she was recently named one of Variety’s Directors to Watch), with original ideas about how to use music and visuals to plug us into the Millennial experience. The movie opens by skipping through tracks on a “shitty fucking playlist,” but establishes a unique sonic signature as it goes, ending with a poignant howl. The journey feels genuinely cathartic for Nesher and audiences alike, without ever feeling like therapy through filmmaking.