Just watched "Eurofalsh - the movie". A bit of a dissapointment. This movie was based on a brilliant idea that had the potential to become a must-see-film for every Eurovision fan. Basicly, it's a documentary about a band that performs Eurovision covers - with lipsinc and the exact dance moves - on Eurovision sunday parties in Israel. The movie tells the story of the band members, and how the band, with all its glory and fame, became their means of escape from their everyday personal problems. The four band members who are the heart of the plot - Micky, Ben, Irit and Eran, are all very colourful characters with a potential of spicing up everything and making the movie into a hit. Unfortunately, amateurism and an apparent lack of creativity turned this movie into a quite boring work, with not even a single moment that I really liked or became moved by.
Right from the start, when the opening theme of Eurovision sounded, I understood that this movie was not going to be a burst of originality and creativity. And I was quite right. The movie lacked the drama and the glory that a movie about Eurovision fans should defenitely contain. The conflict between the glorious life of sunday night's show and the normal life was not emphasized enough. The band members were not given each his unique and intrigueing portrait and their colourfulness was not apparent. All the questions the interviewer asked were very expected ("what if eurovision would cease to exist") and boring, and the answers sounded cut out, and not like a natural flowing story. There was also a part where they featured Israel not qualifying in ESC 2011 - really unnecessary and irrelevant to the plot, which was timeless and spreaded over several years (and several Eurovisions).
If I would have created that movie, I would focus more on the personal stories. Eurovision would stay mainly at the background, and the people and their emotions and passions would conquer the main stage. In addition, I would want to demonstrate to the average non-Eurofan viewer how the Eurovision fans see the band members - as some kind of envied celebrities. I would have done it by showing attractive high-quality scene shots of the band dancing and performing, showing-off their charisma and talent big time. In the movie, there's not even one good shot of the band on stage. 100% of the shots are taken from too close to the stage and from down, which causes a distortion of the perspective and prevent us from seeing the whole choreography. For the average viewer who haven't heard about the Eurofalsh before, the whole performance concept would seem very amateuristic.
But the movie has its moments, when it raises some interesting issues. The band members ask a question at one point: Do they wanna become professionals and try to reach higher with the band idea, or do they wanna continue treat it as a hobby and hope that one day, someone would "discover" them and do all the hard work? Well. Becoming a professional band of artists also means re-branding everything, and making some hard descisions that, from then on, would be based on professional motivations, rather than on friendly ones. Judging by the band members' arguments about who's getting to do "the solo", and why those who established the band 10 years ago should always have priority - I guess they may want to keep it as a non-profitable hobby.
Another interesting aspect in the movie is the "low self esteem issue". In the movie, Micky claims that even though they know they are very talented, they don't wanna go proffessional because they all have low self esteem. To this adds the fact that the band, in all it's 10 years of existence and performing, has never demanded any sort of payment from the Eurovision club in which it performs (even though they do attract the custumers). They even feel guilty after asking for 100 NIS for props. I don't know if it has to do a lot with low self esteem. But I think that somewhere deep inside, the band members suspect that the band exist more for the benefit of themselves, than for the benefit of the audience and the bar-costumers. Unlike popular artists, the Eurofalsh wants to perform, more than the audience wants to watch. I mean, the audience do have a lot of fun watching them, but sometimes people just wanna be left alone and dance to Eurovision music without someone on stage showing them the right way to do it. Eurovision fans, after all, love to be the diva themselves, not only the admirers. Based on this, would the eurofalsh be sponsored had they went proffessional?
The movie has some kind of a happy-end, where one year later, each band member solved his personal conflicts and found balance in life. Micky, the teacher who was torn by the love to dancing and performing and the will to experience family life, managed to have a baby. Irit, who always hanged up with gays and never had a serious hetrosexual relationship, finally found a boyfriend. Eran, who was bankrupt and lost his business, returned to work as a fashion designer. And Ben, who had Eurovision as the center of his life, finally found himself professionaly and started a career as a police officer. What the movie does not show, is how these changes in the lives of the band members, affect Eurofalsh in the close future. Will they stay a tight group of friends as they were? Would their interest in Eurovision stay the same, now that each one of them have a new main interest in his life? And will they ever stop fighting over solos? The answer would probably have to wait for "Eurofalsh 2", if it would ever be created.
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