Ilan Ben-Natan is a man on his sixties and a well-known professor of astrophysics at the University of Haifa. He is married with Naomi, a 28 years old, attractive book illustrator. Inclined to suspect, he finds out her wife’s betrayal and then face his wife’s lover, Oded Safra, a painter and a filmmaker, younger than him. During the argument, the scientist kills his rival and takes away the corpse in the boot of his car. With the complicity of his 80 years old mother, Ilan buries the man in a hole just dig in the cemetery. After a series of casualties, the corpse is then found and the commissioner Anton Karam, an old friend of the professor, starts the police investigation. When every signs seems to lead to the discovery of the assassin, an unexpected event will call every element into question again.
How to kill the secret lover of the wife and get away with it, so that the beloved will never know – this is a traditional plot for a noir, but in Hitparzut X the story is enriched by psychological elements spinning around a never evolved mother-son relation and, in the same way, a husband-wife relation where the great difference of age makes the man act like a father for the woman. We all know that in the Mediterranean cultures, and especially in the Jewish tradition, the maternal figure has a strong influence on her offspring, but this film will show us how far a mother can go in order to defend her eternal baby. Inspired by a short novel by Edna Mazaya – who wrote the screenplay for the film as well – and directed by Eitan Zur – one of the authors of Be Tipul, the successful TV series that inspired the HBO series In Treatment – this debut features is built on the weaknesses of the male character. The logical training of the scientist is not sufficient to control the guilt for the committed assassination and the anguish for the risk of seeing his marriage balance falling to pieces. Yes, because he is ready to forget the cheating and even to forgive it. Nevertheless, for a man like him that prefers not to face problems and to act as if nothing has happened, it is easy to manage the reality until it comes to light. The film develops as a spiral, the same one that haunts the main character, a man that seems destined to have no way out. Even the plan organised by the old mother, who readily helps the son in trouble, slowly fails. But lucky is the scientist, as the maxim by Friedrick Dürenmatt does not prevail this time – those one stating that it is the Chance that governs the destinies of the humans. –Venice International Critics’ Week
