Rating: ****
What’s interesting about Melissa-mom
& Me is that you don’t know quite what to make of it in those opening
minutes. We open with old camcorder film of a woman that calls herself “Jenny”
saying that she’s about to begin her last day of work at a Tokyo strip club.
Her friend Melissa is there too and they exchange the normal best wishes and
goodbyes that two friends share when they’re parting ways. But what’s there to
regret about being a confused and lost Israeli girl, high on coke and stripping
nightly for Japanese businessmen?
The answer is the people, or more
specifically in this case Melissa. Fast-forward years later, and “Jenny”, whose
real name is Yael Shachar, lives in Israel,
is a successful artist, is married to a good man and is contemplating having
children of her own. Still, she can’t get Melissa off her mind after all these
years, and wonders what her friend from Tokyo might make of
her maternal desires. Before you can say road trip, Yael has her bags packed
and she’s off to North Carolina to find her lost friend and kindred spirit.
The film isn’t so much about Yael’s search
for her friend as it is about what led two smart, attractive young women, who
surely must have had prospect and opportunities, to find themselves halfway
around the world, taking their clothes off for money and getting high afterward.
Melissa, with brutal honesty, describes some of the things that led her down
that path, including a father that was sexually abusive. She had a tougher time
getting out of the life than Yael, who says that despite going back to Israel,
it took forever to shake the demons that haunted her in Tokyo.
Despite the inner darkness plumbed by these
two women, the documentary is surprisingly hopeful. It says that you can be
more than the sum of your rotten experiences and can attain some level of
comfort and happiness with yourself. There’s a great deal of joy in seeing
these women, who shared so much negativity, bring the positive things about
their time in Tokyo, their mutual love and friendship, and talk freely and
openly about how they came out of the dark. It’s actually quite beautiful.
Director Limor Pinhasov shoots in a very
in-your-face style that’s immediate and honest. It’s very complementary to
Yael’s own Tokyo footage, which is mostly dark and grainy and filled with a lot of
red tint. Held up against Pinhasov’s footage, which is very warm and bright
thanks to the North Carolina sun, there’s a nice balance of visuals to suit the thematic balance
that’s achieved. Melissa-mom & Me was a very interesting and
surprising documentary about how the bonds of friendship can endure the most
terrible of circumstances, even thousands of miles away and years later.
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