$9.99

Third time lucky! Director Tatia Rosenthal and writer Etgar Keret had collaborated twice earlier before their feature-length film brought their artistic relationship to perfect fruition. $9.99 is a colourful mosaic of human fate where realism coexists with surrealism and allegory does not undermine reliability. Tatia Rosenthal invites us to a world full of swearing angels, frustrated clerks, centimetres-high drop-outs, vamp-like models, kids who are not ready to grow up and grown-ups who are not ready for kids. The title amount is the price of a manual explaining the sense of life to everybody. But can it change anything? Will the characters cease to miss their happiness? Rosenthal found a perfect form for the polyphonic prose of Keret where atmosphere is often changed. Post-frame animation allowed her to extract the absurdity of the dramatic situation and to fill the comic scenes with peculiar sadness. Paradoxically, the simplified mimics of the characters enhanced the authenticity of the film.When faced with a situation we cannot cope with, we all appear uncertain.

Michał Walkiewicz