A Chinese housekeeper leaves her 6-year old son (BaoQi Chen) with her Israeli employer, Miri (Mili Avital), for “just one hour” while she rushes off to attend to some urgent errand. By the next day she has still not returned.
Miri is a twice-widowed flight attendant for El Al. Sharing her apartment is her sister Gila (Anat Waxman), who is squatting there with her teenage daughter while she contemplates divorcing her husband. What they don’t need is a little boy with an unpronounceable name who speaks not a word of Hebrew. In fact, he speaks no word at all in his anguish at having been abandoned by his mother.
The little boy is a Chinese Charlie Brown, with a big round head and woeful eyes, and the sisters cannot bring themselves to abandon him a second time. Thus begins their strange odyssey of trying to find the mother, trying to communicate with the boy, trying to get a translation of the message his mother has scrawled in Mandarin on a wall of their squalid home, and finally, trying to figure out how to get the boy to Beijing, once they learn that that’s where his mother has been deported (She was picked up by Immigration officers shortly after she left Miri’s apartment).
Because she entered Israel illegally, she is not registered in the country. Nor is her son, even though he was born there. So, in legal terms, neither of them exists. To prove that he was born, that he exists, and that he is his mother’s son, involves voluminous paperwork in both Israel and China, DNA tests, notarized affidavits, official documents and processes that will take, the sisters estimate, at least a year to complete.
Meanwhile, the boy, whom they call Noodle, after his favorite food, has begun to loosen up in their care.
Easily the most adorable and lovable child actor since Shirley Temple, he is playful and mischievous and imaginative and bright.
And while he grows to love the sisters and they him, they are aware that they will have to return him to his mother. How they do that involves a plan so elaborate that it might have been concocted by Inspector Clouseau.
“Noodle” is a delightful film: warm, funny, and emotionally satisfying on all counts. Written by Shemi Zarhin and Ayelet Menahem and directed by Ayelet Menahem, it won the Special Grand Prize of the Jury at the Montreal World Film Festival last year and the Best Supporting Actress Award of the Israel Film Academy for Anat Waxman, as well as nine other nominations.
Although the film was released in Israel in 2007, it has only been seen in this country in the 2008 film festivals in Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, and now as part of the 23rd Israel Film Festival, currently screening at the Laemmle Theaters (the Royal in Los Angeles, the Sunset 5 in West Hollywood, and the Fallbrook 7 in West Hills), running from June 12 through the 26.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 20, 2008. Read the original PDF.