Wedding Doll

In his first narrative feature, documentarian Nitzan Gilady demonstrates an assured grasp of visual storytelling, using a stunningly rugged desert setting that’s as much a character as the film’s perpetually sunny, intellectually challenged 24-year-old and her world-weary mother.

The bittersweet and gently moving Wedding Doll sidesteps so many of the traps it sets for itself because writer-director Nitzan Gilady is less interested in the purity of his heroine than he is in what it reveals from within the people around her.

Wedding Doll is a small film with a unique take on coming of age and finding one's own place in a world that's often unwelcoming to people who are different.

Though the darker tonal shift toward the end is a bit jarring, director/scenarist Gilady demonstrates a deft, confident hand with the storytelling, cast and general packaging, and makes assertive use of the dramatic desert setting.

I suppose the fact that I was affected as I was by Wedding Doll is testimony to its emotional effectiveness. But while Hagit is able to crack a smile at the movie’s end, I feel a pall wrapping around me every time I contemplate her predicament, or the predicament of her real-life models.

Mr. Gilady, a documentarian making his fiction feature debut as a writer and director, over-stacks the deck with this belabored if artfully shot story.

There’s a potentially good story to be mined here, probably most likely with the mother, but every time it starts to find fertile emotional ground, it can’t help but become distracted and search for another surface.