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.