“Human Resources Manager” is a handy management euphemism for a low-level bureaucrat who used to be called a personnel director. He/She is in charge of not hiring people during hiring freezes which thaw whenever a real executive wants to hire needs a job for a relative. The movie of the same name, an Israeli offering, shows just how much travail accompanies the job.
Mark Ivanir is the title character in this slice-of-life tale whose characters don’t have names. Titles or descriptives will do. He’s emotionally battered by a teetering marriage, browbeaten by his boss (Gila Almagor as the Widow), overworked and visibly exhausted, but basically kind-hearted and of a forgiving nature. He works at a large and successful bakery.
One bright morning in Jerusalem in 2002, a suicide bomber attacks a bus. One of the victims, a Romanian, has a bakery paycheck in her purse, but she is unidentified, her body is unclaimed and still at the morgue, and a local newspaper reporter (Guli Alfi as the Weasel) accuses the company of a variety of sins. The Widow sends our hero off to solve everything and restore the bakery’s good named.
Of course, nothing is simple. The girl’s immediate boss says he fired her, but then confesses he loved the girl and was having an affair until his wife found out. A guilty conscience kept her on the payroll after she was fired.
The Widow now decides that something must be done to keep the bread literally in the ovens and figuratively on her table. The H.R. manager is therefore told to take the body back to Romania for a proper burial. And that’s where the fun starts, with Ivanir forced to deal with the victim’s surly, foul-mouthed teenage son, her aged mother, her bad-tempered ex-husband, a preening consular official and the incompetent Romanian police and soldiers.
It’s absurdist comedy, an attack on bureaucrats and political red tape and probably funnier if one did not have to depend on sub-titles, but it’s still a rather funny movie, nicely directed by Evan Riklis, from a novel, “A Woman in Jerusalem,” by A. B. Yehoshua. A moral? Well, a death in a family causes all sorts of problems. When you’re not part of the family, it can be very funny.
The Human Resources Manager opens today at the Plaza Frontenac Cinema
—Joe