The Human Resources Manager

Director: Eran Riklis
Cast: Mark Ivanir; Reymond Amsalem; Gila Almagor and Julian Negulesco
DVD release: 5 October 2011
Rated: M

Eran Riklis, the Israeli director who gave us the excellent Lemon Tree a couple of years ago, moves to an offbeat road picture about a dedicated human resources officer. To placate his boss he accompanies the body of a deceased employee through Romania for burial. Perhaps that doesn’t sound your cup of tea, but there’s humanity, compassion and even unexpected humour to be found along the particularly visual journey.

The stressed human resources manager (Mark Ivanir) of a huge commercial bakery in Jerusalem doesn’t realize one of his employees has been killed in a bus bombing; so the woman’s body remains unidentified at the city morgue. The bakery is blamed by a snide newspaper reporter (Guri Alfi), who does a piece on the bakery’s indifference to their staff.

The dead woman turns out to be Yulia, an immigrant worker from Romania. The HR manager is ordered to find the relatives of the deceased by his boss (Gila Almagor), who is not at all pleased by the burst of bad press. Turns out there’s disenchanted ex-husband (Bogan Stanoevitch) and delinquent son (Noah Silver) living in Romania. But the body has to be identified before burial by Yulia’s mother (Irina Petrescu), who live in a distant rural village, a thousand kilometers away in the grim frosty hinterland, once Soviet territory.

So the HR manager embarks on the gloomy trip, concerned at leaving his young daughter when a special dance event is coming up. His relationship with wife and daughter become important later in the story. Because of bad weather a plane trip is impossible, so the odd party of misfits set off in an ancient kombi van with an equally ancient driver, Yulia’s belligerent teenage son, one befuddled consul, the vengeful reporter referred to as Weasel, and one coffin slung on top.

The long journey is complicated by every conceivable problem, many of them bureaucratic, slowing progress. The kombi breaks down and is substituted with an armored tank, still having the long-suffering coffin strapped to the top, now deeply coated with ice. Things take on a surrealistic air, despite most of the film being shot with grotty realism. An underground military bunker certainly has weird overtones. The hardened HR manager, after making the harrowing odyssey, becomes determined to bury the woman with proper rights and dignity, and finds new warmth within himself.

Perhaps in the tradition of Chaplin, none of the characters are named except Yulia; equally the Eastern European country remains unidentified, although the filming was done in Romania. Filled with striking sometimes unsettling images of strange beauty, there’s an almost hypnotic quality to scenes on the road. Bram Stoker would approve - the eerie bleak country could well be the home of vampires.

In some ways the most interesting part of the story is the Israel section, where we learn about a relationship between Yulia and another employee of the bakery, who inadvertently causes the body to remain unidentified. The melancholic late-night scene of the HR manager visiting the morgue to reluctantly view the body is effective; as are scenes involving the arrangements to fly the coffin to Romania, including a memorable shot of the casket rising on a platform, then coming to rest with a distressing thump. What starts realistically develops the element of fantasy as it moves through Romania, or else the plot has a few discrepancies.

The characters all superbly developed, especially Mark Ivanir (The Good Shepherd) as the HR manager, due to the skill of director Eran Riklis working from a script by Noah Stollman, based on a novel by A. B. Jehoshua. Admittedly the film moves slowly if surely along its path, and the darker elements are offset by droll humour.

Less assessable and considerably more sombre than the engaging Lemon Tree, it’s a Kafkaesque road trip that may run a little long for comfort. Yet there's no doubt its images will remain with you, thanks to the cinematography of Rainer Klausmann.

John Bale