Hello Goodbye (2008)

One of the best films i have seen

Dreadfully Boring

Boring, long, and too preachy.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

A nice comedy. not the best, not the most convincing but interesting for the good intention to explore the couple relations, a new life and its premises, clash between civilisations and different sources of humor. the risk to see it only as a film with Fanny Ardant and Gerard Depardieu is not small. but it has the virtue to be part of a long French cinema tradition about meet with different spaces, temptations for a couple, need to save appearences and a trip defining the marriage. so, a nice film. maybe, in part, for the good intentions.

I always like the move of Gérard Depardieu who is really a good actor. He is always sincere in his movie, that's the reason it moves me. No matter he acts a bad man or good man. Gérard Depardieu plays well the part of Alana Gaash as a middle-age man who shows great tolerance for his wife and even the couple love life. The thing I didn't think of is the environment of Isreal which shall not be that bad in my imagine. It shall be more beautiful. And both the actor and actress act like normal people which gives no "show" factors. All in all, I like it.

"Hello Goodbye" is a movie about a wealthy middle-aged French couple that suddenly experiences a storm of difficulties. Alain Gaash is Jewish and his family is surprised and somewhat taken aback when his son decides to marry a Christian woman in a church. Alain's wife Gisèle had converted to Judaism in order to marry him, but she realizes suddenly that his family still sees her as non-Jewish. Alain's Jewish friends don't see him as Jewish enough because he isn't circumcised, and the couple ends up having a late identity crisis. The main focus of the film though, is not so much on the search of Jewish identity, but on Gisèle's search for meaning: she was a housewife for years, who gave up her career to support her husband and raise their son. Now that the son has left home, her life is empty. She does all sorts of crazy things, like destroying her expensive car, and convincing her husband to move to Israel, where they had no secure income or even a home. Gisèle seeks the "help" of a very suspicious drug-using "Rabbi" and falls for his good looks and "wisdom". Alain suspects that their bad love-life is due to the fact that he is not circumcised, even if they had had problems in this area before their identity crisis, so he gets a circumcision. This of course, changes nothing. In any case, the couple barely has anything to do with each other: Gisèle finds out where Alain is working by chance, Alain finds out by accident that Gisèle didn't tell him their furniture was thrown into the Meditarranean on the way to Israel... At some point, not only do the main characters lose contact with each other, the film loses all contact with it's audience. The ending is so ridiculous and shmalzig it's unbearable. My recommendation: Skip it.

A barely religious French Jewish gynecologist is cajoled and convinced by his converted-to-Judaism wife that she really wants to move to Israel to explore their Jewish roots. On a brief exploratory visit, he is promised a job at an Israeli hospital when a current gynecologist moves to the US. Also they buy into an apartment which is under construction but ought to be finished soon. So they break it to his parents and family, pack up their stuff, and move to Israel The doctor who was supposed to move to the US has reasons for delaying, the apartment construction is stalled due to finances, which leads to a lot of problems including that he takes a job washing cars at a hotel. He decides to go back to France but his wife doesn't want to. Eventually, ....