Love, Theft and Other Entanglements is an enjoyable, low budget Palestinian film, although it feels like maybe a slight missed opportunity to be as excellent as its premise.
Mousa is a bored car thief, warn down by living under occupation, with an opportunity to get out of Palestine if he can get together $5000. Unfortunately, one day he steals the wrong car, and this leads to an increasingly desperate spiral of circumstances.
Love, Theft and Other Entanglements begins really strongly. The film is in black and white, and with no dialogue for the first minutes, it introduces a surreal air of silent comedy. It is frequently funny and frequently tense and unpredictable. The slight missed opportunity is that it isn't quite consistently enough of both or either. The dark humour works well when present, but doesn't always knit with the more serious side. TI feels like the humour is being held back a little and with a bit more bit, it would have been a slightly more satisfying film.
The film is definitely at its best at its most comic, and a scene with a blind old woman and a missing goat is an awful lot funnier than that sounds.
It also does a good job of making an entertaining film that doesn't shy away from the way that the conflict surrounding people living in Palestine pervades every day life and how wearying it is to live in such a situation. It doesn't hit you over the head with a message, but instead lets it seep into all the background and specific parts of the plot.
Overall the film has promise and potential that it perhaps doesn't fully deliver on, but it was still an enjoyable and original take on something that is normally most present in our culture as the subject of grim headlines.
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