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The wings aren’t broken, but her dreams pretty much are. Dressed in the slinky black costume of a fallen angel, 17-year-old Maya Ulman (Maya Maron) pedals angrily home on her bike through the streets of Haifa — one of many striking images in Israeli director Nir Bergman’s inventive family melodrama. Once again Maya’s wishes are frustrated — this time it’s a chance for her band to win a competition — by the need to help out her widowed mother. Dafna Ulman (Orly Silbersatz Banai) has another late shift to work at "the world’s oldest profession," as Maya puts it — a midwife. Maya, meanwhile, has to babysit her 11-year-old brother Ido (he likes to makes videos of himself jumping from neck-breaking heights) and her mournful little sister Bahr. Her older brother Yair, never quite the same since their father died nine months ago, is out somewhere distributing leaflets dressed as a mouse. Sounds like the set-up for a bad soap, but the screenplay’s humanity and wit and the honest performances and honest faces of the cast see Broken Wings through. And, as noted, there’s Bergman’s knack for the abrupt and arresting image. On the downside, I don’t think I’ve seen a film rely so heavily on the telephone (it averages about one call every five minutes) as a way of handling its simultaneous-crises structure. Annoying cell-phone rings aside, Wings has legs. In Hebrew with English subtitles. (87 minutes)
BY PETER KEOUGH
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