User Reviews

Directed, written and starring Michal Bat-Adam, this adaption of The Lover, a novel by A. B. Yehoshua, had been in development by Cannon for nearly a decade, with Boaz Davidson and Dan Wolman both attached to direct at one point or another.

The novel was a big deal because of the taboos it broke in Israel, telling the stories of a married woman and her lover, a married father and his daughter's friend, and the forbidden love between a Jewish girl and her Arabic lover.

Adam (Yehoram Gaon) and Asia (Bat-Adam) are a sexless married couple. She quickly falls into the bed of a tutor named Gavriel (Roberto Pollack), who agrees to help her if Adam fixes his grandmother's car. The young man disappears during the Yom Kippur War and Adam, his daughter Dafi and their co-worker Naim all try to find him, which ends up with Dafi and Naim falling in love and one of her schoolmates throwing herself at the older man.

The Lover was a media scandal in Israel, as all of the infidelity in the movie is presented as normal. Bat-Adam nearly gave up filmmaking, but the film was a success and today she is known as one of the queens of Israeli cinema.

*** May contain spoilers. ***

HA ME'AHEV or THE LOVER is brimming with shapely attractive females barely dressed and undressed. A man has a sexy wife and a 15 year old daughter with sexy teen friends. All of the remarkably shapely 15 year old girls seek to show themselves nude before the husband, and/or have physical relations with him. Speaking of physical relations, the wife has a lover, as well as the teen daughter. When not having sex, the teen girlie-girls lounge around in thong panties and unbuttoned shirts. The only time anyone in the film wears a bra is when it is going to be removed at the start of a love scene. Did I mentioned students in Israeli schools wear hot pants uniforms?

Palistines are having sex with the Israelis, so maybe the point of the movie is make love not war. I don't know. There is a good deal of serious social-political talk between the nudity.

Michal Bat-Adam is shapely and womanly. Avigail Ariely, Eves Hativ, and Noa Itzki are very perky teens (if I have ID'ed them correctly). I can't say this is a good film, but I will watch it again the next time it repeats on AZN.

I watched this movie on TV one evening, sometime in 2000 or 2001. I didn't know anything about the director or the cast. Actually I didn't pay attention to the title either. Very curious, because the movie impressed me, and it came back to my mind often during the years. A film I couldn't remember the title, any name from the cast, anything, while remembering perfectly almost every detail. An Israeli family where for some time things were far from running well. The husband owning a body shop, the wife teaching Spanish, their girl at the difficult age of fifteen - sixteen. An unknown guy appearing out of the blue, pretending that he had come from Argentina to inherit a dying aunt here. Meanwhile being without money, dying of hunger. The husband offering him shelter, a torrid affair exploding between the wife and the stranger, the husband incapable of doing anything against. It's 1967, the war erupts between Israel and his neighbors. The stranger leaves the house, presumably to join the military, and simply vanishes. The wife enters a deep depression, and the husband understands that in order to save her he has to find the guy. For a week or so he searches for the guy everywhere (here the story takes a picaresque turn, with unexpected turns and funny episodes, like many stories of this kind). The aunt is far from dying, a schoolmate of the girl wants to start her sexual life and pushes the husband to commit, the girl herself starts her sexual life with the husband's apprentice (a very young and very nice Palestinian, otherwise helping the husband in his search) - and meanwhile the wife going on with her depression. Eventually the stranger is found, the scoundrel had just entered an orthodox community to avoid drafting. Why did this movie remain so deeply in my memory? I think because I found in it a deep understanding of what true love is: the husband's love for his wife. In order to cure her for the depression the only thing to do was to find the vanished stranger. Thus, I knew anything about the movie's story, nothing at all about title, cast, production year. We are now approaching the end of 2018, and one evening I felt that I needed to find the movie, by any cost. I searched on the web for three or four hours, browsing various sites of any kind, trying various search tips, till I found it! The Lover, made in 1985.