Movie Review: 'Rita Working Title' looks at the relationship between a writer and her words

Creative writers are devoted first to their words. It is a relationship that, like others, must be watered in order to grow and then nurtured in order to develop into its own. Michal Bat-Adam’s Rita Working Title is about this relationship and how, if a writer does not know herself well enough, the relationship can circle around going only where it’s already been. Or it can just stop. Words can divorce a writer.

Rita Working Title is not a cop-out by Bat-Adam to avoid the lame and unforgiving “untitled” for the film. Although it could benefit from a colon after Rita, the intrigue of not having one is kind of nice; it adds to the exploration of the film. Rita, the woman, the screenwriter, is the working title. The movie she cannot seem to write, or complete, is also the working title, for how easy is it to name what has yet to be born? Since a writer often becomes what is being written, since a writer writes best when she writes what she knows, Rita and her work are working titles.

The whole thing really is quite nice, charming even. In the course of this 100-minute production, Rita manages to write, for the audience to watch come to life, four different screenplays, none complete because she says she’s tired of writing the same old story of desire unfulfilled. Though for the viewer, the lack of fulfillment comes when the story is abandoned just when it starts to get good.

In each script, Rita plays the main character, yet another indication that she truly is this working title, lost if you will. It’s not until her best friend, a terribly attractive professional actor named Gadi discovers that he has no idea who or where he is, for, as the co-star in her script attempts, he plays a taxi driver, a mechanic, an accordion player and a bachelor with a broken heart. Gadi decides he cannot go on like this.

Of course, it is up to Rita to write them both out of the mess she created. And no, the film is not a let down. Rita does in fact clean up her mess, and she does it in the way that most creative writers do. She divorced the words.

Movie Review: 'The Path of the Skeptics': an art gallery on film

The Path of the Skeptics was like viewing an exhibition in a museum more so than watching the film it actually was in the Landmark Theatre Thursday night. Perhaps it was that, having been my first experience with a short film (it ran exactly 30 minutes), I obsessed over every frame. I was taken by the extreme amount of grace given to each shot and the amount of care given to those things in the shots.

By Italian filmmaker Filippo Feel Cavalca, The Path of the Skeptics (La passeggiata dello scettico) displays just how significant some meetings are. The story is Danilo’s, an agnostic philosophy student, on the anniversary of his mother’s death. His mother, Celeste, was an artist, which explains why the film could be made into a series of stills and sold as framed art. As Danilo remembers it, she was “enraptured in blue.” Throughout the short, blue flower pedals, very much alive and very much a symbol of her, rain down turning the screen into a spring dance.

When the priest, Don Luciano, comes to bless Danilo’s house, the two find that they share not just a common love for philosophy but a need for God as well. And so their paths cross, putting both men’s existence into context: “Freedom can frighten a man,” says Don Luciano. With that, they are both left with a choice.

Cavalca didn’t let one minute go unused in The Path of the Skeptics. A film done so well is like stepping into the rooms of an art gallery, for if the gallery also uses the entire potential of its space, the visitor is left open-eyed and full.