Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Limerculer A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Baseshment I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

TheLittleSongbird My main reason for seeing 'Promised Land', the first film in Amos Gitai's "Border Trilogy", was Rosamund Pike early on in her career. She was a promising young talent at the time and has really grown into a very good and better-than-given-credit-for actress who really delivers in the right role, as can be evidenced in one of the best Best Actress performances of the decade, and one of the best performances that year, in 'Gone Girl'.There was also intrigue as to how 'Promised Land' would deal with such a heavy, harrowing and nasty subject matter, human trafficking, something that is important to be raised awareness of and not addressed enough in visual media (film and television alike) while also being difficult to do it justice. As can be made clear from watching 'Promised Land'. Any film that takes on a subject such as human trafficking should be applauded for trying, but it is my feeling that 'Promised Land' could have dealt with it much more and handled it with more sincerity and taste. It is neither terrible or great, as a matter to me it's one of those difficult to rate and discuss films, and to be seen to see how human trafficking can be portrayed on screen and for completests of Rosamund Pike and Amos Gitai. That is if one can find it, with that it had a limited release at the time and, other than various websites having it in full, its availability is relatively obscure.'Promised Land', starting with its strengths, does start off promisingly. It has a very evocative opening scene and some of the first half has a gritty documentary-like feel. Some of it looks good, the first half is shot pretty well, the locations are striking and atmospheric and there is some impressively rich lensing in some of the night sequences.When it comes to the acting, which is actually not too bad at all considering what they were given, the standouts are Hanna Schygulla bringing a menacing but also comforting charisma to her role (more so than it deserved, with some really clunky dialogue that sounded made up on the spot) and Anne Parillaud, quite moving in hers. Rosamund Pike disappointingly doesn't have that much to do and the role is very limited in depth, but she nonetheless gives a conscientious and brave performance (again like Schygulla, more so than the material deserved). Some scenes are suitably harrowing.However, 'Promised Land's' promise doesn't last very long. The first half did have its faults, with some of the pacing being dull and taking too long a time to get to the point, but the film really loses its way in the second half. The subject as has been said is unspeakably harrowing, you don't have to have gone through it yourself to know that, so a nasty approach is appropriate and necessary, but it still could have been done with more tact than this. Here the horrors were both excessive and trivialised and the treatment of the women was portrayed in a way that was self-indulgent and gratuitously salacious, done to overkill effect.Coherence, or lack of it, is also an issue. There is not much going on plot-wise in terms of structure and some of it is aimless. The second half in particular is repetitive and figuring out what's going on beyond the endless stringing of torture (and such) scenes was near-impossible. Telling who was who was the same (the far too dark lighting does not help), with the film having characters that despite the actors' best efforts have no development to them whatsoever. The dialogue is continually clunky and says nothing illuminating about this subject other than what we already know, and Gitai's direction is heavy-handed. Emotional impact is non-existent, the film is just far too distasteful to evoke any kind of empathy and the characters are too flimsily developed to make one care for them properly. Then there's the all too convenient Deux Ex Machina conclusion, which was too much of a cop-out.Overall, started off with a lot of promise but loses its way drastically in particularly the second half. 5/10 Bethany Cox

FilmCriticLalitRao This film is a major disappointment by Amos Gitai.One should even call it a blot on his career.Promised land is neither a feature film nor a documentary nor anything which can lie in between.It features two popular stars Anne Parillaud and Hanna Schygulla but even their presence is not helpful enough to sustain viewers' interest.The film is about the plight of some Russian girls which are sold in Israel but its presentation is really bad. It does not make any sense as in order to heighten the importance of the topic Amos Gitai has decided to shoot the most part of the film in darkness. However darkness cannot hide the film's defects.The film maker has surely not done his homework well due to which viewers are forced to watch a crude succession of abominably cruel scenes in which women are traded like cattle.Most of the actors too suffer in this film as their roles have not been defined properly.Recommendation:better watch this film and be bitter about it rather than being sullen without having seen it.

butchins1 This was an incredibly important subject...treated in an amateurish, arrogant way. The director expected the audience to understand what was going on...this was impossible: there was no plot, no script to "speak" of, no plot points, no character development, no story development. It was filmed in a shaky documentary style (which is valid if you have something to say). I was always taught that any narrative, be it a movie, book, play, even a piece of music, has to have a beginning, a middle and an end - this dreadful excuse for a movie had a beginning...and then it waffled for the next hour or so until the woman we sort of guessed was the heroine, ran off into the night. Let's be specific: The opening sequence wasn't that bad - very evocative scenes in the dessert, camels, Bedouin, a group of Eastern European women, a campfire, lots of Russian and Arabic chit chat - OK, "expectations build": Next scene (after the first obligatory rape scene): auction of the Eastern European women as prostitutes: very noisy, not sure who the English-speaking (French-accented) person was - a buyer or a seller: couldn't make that out. A van drives by with two people in the back (man/woman) staring out at the auction...who are they, why are they there? Nobody knows. Next scene: in a nightclub (after the "hosing down" of the prostitutes - a highly contrived scene, calculated to make us think of Holocaust victims in the showers - come on Amos, what are you really trying to say? The woman from the van (we eventually learn her name is Rose - Rosamund Pike) which was driving around the auction and her boyfriend (is he her boyfriend?) arrive at the nightclub, one of the prostitutes asks her for help. Rose is totally confused: "What, how, why - I can't help you...why me?" she says indicating that she doesn't even understand the cry for help. Next scene, Rose and her boyfriend (?) are in the passenger compartment of a van with ALL THE PROSTITUTES IN THE BACK! Hello...! What's going on here? She couldn't (or wouldn't) help the prostitute escape, why is she in the van with them? Contrived gratuitous sex scene with Rose and her boyfriend (?). Next scene, the van arrives in a grimy industrial area, unloads the prostitutes at what is apparently a brothel ("The Promised Land" of the title) - and lo and behold, Rose the mystery woman gets out with them and enters the brothel: where's her boyfriend? Dunno... Why is she there with them? Dunno...She and the "heroine" - the prostitute who begged her for help in the nightclub - sit huddled together listening to the driving rain (it wasn't raining when they entered the brothel), talking as if they were old friends. Flashback, to Estonia, the prostitute is a virginal choir girl, singing about the "Peace of Jerusalem" (in English mind you), pure driven snow outside (another "message") and suddenly Rose appears: OK now I'm totally lost. Then the audience is jerked back to the present with a terrorist attack on the brothel - why? There's nobody around, the only people there (apparently) are whores and their johns...upstairs - why a terrorist attack here? Everybody runs outside, the prostitute who asked for help and Rose escape in the confusion and run off into the night. Close. ..and this won a prize at the Venice Film Festival!!!!??? It wouldn't win a passing grade in a student film contest. It's clearly a case of the Emperor's New Clothes: this has to be the most self-indulgent so-called movie ever to grace the screen: even "Plan 9 from Outer Space" had some quirky charm... Sorry Amos - not even an "E" for effort.

saareman (Some plot spoilers) I saw Amos Gitaï's film 'Promised Land' at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 14, 2004 at its 2nd North American screening. The film had just world premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 7, 2004 where it won the Emblem of Peace Award.Director Gitaï was at the screening and made some brief introductory remarks during which he said that the film was dedicated to his mother who had passed away during the course of the filming and who had been a lifelong advocate for women's issues. He also said that his main goal with this film was to portray an anti-'Pretty Woman' point of view and to show that prostitution was in no way a life of glamour, champagne and limousines and that prostitution images of that nature, whether portrayed in film media or elsewhere, were even used by criminal elements to lure young women into sexual slavery. Due to time limitations there was no Q and A session after the film.Certainly with that introduction and the knowledge that this theme and script had attracted international talent as diverse as Hanna Schygulla (The Marriage of Maria Braun, Lili Marleen, Werckmeister Harmonies), Anne Parillaud (La Femme Nikita, Sex is Comedy) and Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day, The Libertine) to appear in the film, I had very huge expectations. Unfortunately, the film could not fulfill them.(Spoilers start) The story concerns a group of young Eastern European women who are smuggled across deserts and borders at the beginning of the film and then auctioned off in the middle of the night at an outdoor slave market, although they still stay together throughout the course of the rest of the film. They are finally able to determine that they are in Israel and the title of the film is meant to be taken ironically in their case. They were presumably seeking to escape poverty in their home countries but their fate now is likely to be even more cruel. There is no back story provided except for one character's later flashback about seeing a choir sing in a countryside church back in Estonia and her saying in voice-over that 'Estonia seemed so far away'. It was often difficult to tell the women apart due to the dark lighting of the film (The film was so dark that when the cinema's projector went on the blink about 10 minutes in and started showing only intermittent flashing images, the audience sat and continued to watch for a good half minute or so, thinking it was part of the regular film, until finally a few brave souls started to clap in annoyance. After a short repair, the screening continued.) No character or name introduction was made for most of the women which didn't help the situation. They are just objects to be brutalized and assaulted by the various smugglers and guards during the journey. They end up transported to a restaurant/night club that doubles as a brothel and there they are stripped off and hosed down and then superficially dressed and made-up to attract customers. Hanna Schygulla appears in a cameo as the head madam in charge of this process and Anne Parillaud is a junior madam/gang leader. Again, no background is given about them either (although Schygulla calms one of the young women by making it sound like she herself went through the same tortuous journey at one time). At this point a British woman (played by Rosamund Pike) rather mysteriously appears in the midst of the club and there is some suspense as you wonder whether she is there to help the women as some sort of undercover police agent or whether she is a captive herself. The women are held at night on board a ship in the harbor and it is there where the use of a 'deus ex machina' plot device leads to the resolution. (Spoilers end)Admittedly, the dehumanizing anonymous treatment that the women receive was probably part of the point in order to convey the cold-hearted brutal nature of the background to prostitution, but it didn't provide the audience with a specific character to identify with for most of the running time and when one of the East European women did finally emerge as the lead in this respect, it seemed like an afterthought and rather too late in the plot.Overall, this has the feeling of an incomplete effort about a serious subject that really deserved more work and it leaves the impression that the budget and thus the shooting schedule did not allow for more to be done. For comparison, see Lukas Moodysson's 'Lilja 4-ever', which gets a similar story across with much more impact, primarily by focusing on a single young woman.Disappointing, an important story is not told clearly enough. 5/10