15 Years: Review

21st April 2020

Yoav’s (Oded Leopold) life is falling apart. First, he finds out that his best friend, Alma (Ruti Asarsai) is pregnant and he’s upset that she didn’t tell him sooner, then his boyfriend, Dan (Udi Persi) starts talking about babies, raising the question of them becoming parents.

After all, Yoav and Dan have been in a relationship for fifteen years, but for Yoav it’s all becoming a bit too much to handle.

15 Years is a domestic drama about a couple in Tel Aviv where one of them starts to contemplate how his life is changing and how things are getting out of his control. As soon as Alma announces to a room full of people that she’s pregnant before she tells Yoav, the cracks start to show. Yoav becomes angry and distant, falling into a spiral of self-destruction as he thinks about what life has in store for him if he decides to go down the more domestic route of family life.

Yoav has issues with his family as well, his mother died some time ago and his father is terminally ill. So, he’s feeling the pressure not only from the life that he has, but from the new life that will soon come for his best friend, and also feeling his own mortality creeping up on him.

Yoav feels that if a child were to brought into his life, either through his best friend or his relationship, then he would literally feel the years dripping away. Add to that the fact that his parents are all but gone from his life, and he makes a dramatic decision to push away those closest to him in order to sort out his feelings.

15 years is a slow-moving drama that not everybody may understand and some may not relate to, as on the surface it seems that Yoav’s behaviour is selfish and vain. However, with so many pivotal moments in his life all happening at once then perhaps some audiences will understand where he is coming from.

All they have to do is to get past the way that writer/director Yuval Hadadi pushes Yoav away from the audience as Yoav does with those that he loves.

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