If you were curious about the series Etty, by Israeli television creator Hagai Levi, but did not manage to see it at the movies, now it is running on Hot VOD, Hot Drama, and Next TV, and will be available on Yes Binge starting May 31.
It’s a fascinating and frustrating series, based on the diaries of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch-Jewish writer who chronicled her spiritual journey as the Nazis occupied the Netherlands and eventually murdered her and her family in Auschwitz.
Those who want a traditional biopic will be disappointed, since this is not so much the story of her life as an attempt to dramatize her diaries and the ideas that fueled her writing.
It stars Julia Windischbauer, an Austrian actress, who brings all of Hillesum’s contradictions and intensity to life brilliantly.
Much of it concerns the solace she found through her treatment with Julius Spier (Sebastian Koch), an unconventional psychologist who trained with Carl Jung and combined psychotherapy with palm reading.
Spier, also Jewish, was decades older than Hillesum and eventually became her lover, a wildly inappropriate relationship by today’s standards, but less scandalous at the time.
He helped her overcome her suicidal impulses, and she began to embrace life just as the Nazis closed in. Joining the Jewish Council, she tried to help the Jews around her and refused to allow her gentile friends to hide her. She died at the age of 29.
Levi is a born storyteller, and he is best known as one of the creators of BeTipul, a groundbreaking Israeli series about a psychologist and his patients that premiered over 20 years ago and was remade in the US as In Treatment, as well as in dozens of countries worldwide.
But watching Etty a second time, I was even more annoyed that Levi chose to set it in a kind of vaguely updated, generic netherworld in which everyone dresses as if they just pulled their tasteful monochromatic sweaters and shirts off the shelf of a chic European boutique.
Levi said that he wanted to charge it with “universal, contemporary relevance” and to tell it “in a new language.”
But we don’t see the yellow stars that would have been worn by the Jews, and while there are menacing officials in some scenes, they are not clearly identified as Nazis.
This omission at the heart of the story is distracting to say the least, and I think it’s a huge mistake to think that her story would not have “universal, contemporary relevance” if it were to show clearly that the Nazis killed Hillesum and her family because they were Jews. Levi underestimates his audience and, in a sense, betrays his subject.
Much of the globe is gearing up for the World Cup in early June. There are quite a few soccer documentaries coming up or already available, such as Doubters to Believers – Liverpool FC: Klopp’s Era on Yes Docu and Yes VOD, Beckham on Netflix, and The Men Who Sold the World Cup on HBO Max.
The latter series is about the corruption scandal in which Qatar was accused of paying hundreds of millions of dollars in bribes to secure the right to host the 2022 World Cup.
Director Ridley Scott is developing a feature film about this scandal, based on the book American Huckster, about Chuck Blazer, an American-Jewish soccer official who was the key whistleblower in the Qatar affair.
Ted Lasso for the World Cup fans
But if you mean something entirely different when you say the word “football,” you might want to watch, or re-watch, the charming Apple TV+ series Ted Lasso, starring Jason Sudeikis as an American college football coach who is given the unlikely job of managing a losing British soccer team.
This series became a runaway hit that won 13 Emmys and helped untold numbers of people get through the pandemic after its 2020 release.
In today’s turbulent world, its low-key humor and good cheer are perhaps even more welcome.
As coverage of the upcoming World Cup starts to dominate the news, you may enjoy watching the clueless Ted learn the particulars of soccer jargon and rules.
A new series about the American-British soccer divide, Twenty Twenty Six, will start streaming on Cellcom TV on June 1 and on Yes London starting on June 7.
It stars Hugh Bonneville of Downton Abbey as Ian Fletcher, a British soccer official who joins the 2026 World Cup team as the director of integrity, and he faces multiple challenges in the run-up to the largest soccer tournament ever held in North America.
While I have criticized the third season of Euphoria, which is streaming on HBO Max, based on an Israeli show of the same name about troubled teens, for morphing into a kind of torture porn, somehow it remains compelling.
To paraphrase the famous line from Brokeback Mountain, I don’t know how to quit it. But the series is reportedly going to call it quits after Sunday’s episode, and even though I have had to close my eyes more times than I could count this season because of the graphic violence, I’ll be watching.
The Internet is blowing up with predictions for the finale, and I’ll just venture a guess that the character of Lexi (Maude Apatow), an assistant on a teen TV soap opera and aspiring screenwriter, will turn out to have been writing Euphoria all along.
I don’t want to spoil anything for those who haven’t watched the seventh episode, but let’s just say some of the core characters have seen better days.
Euphoria cast
One important story about Euphoria, besides how bleak much of it is, is that its cast has become huge stars, and if you would like to see them in other roles, they are all over the place.
Jacob Elordi, who plays Nate in Euphoria, is starring in Wuthering Heights on HBO Max and Apple TV+, opposite Margot Robbie.
Elordi makes for a gorgeous Heathcliff, and it’s good casting, but for those who love the Emily Brontë novel, every moment of this movie, which dispenses with much of the plot and all of the spirit of the novel, will be agony to sit through.
You can also see the Australian-born Elordi in three teen comedies on Netflix, The Kissing Booth and its two sequels, in which he plays a popular guy, like Nate in some ways, who lives in a sunnier universe and falls for a goofy girl (Joey King of We Were the Lucky Ones).
He also plays the monster in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, which is on Netflix.
Sydney Sweeney, who has become just as big a star, can be seen in the first season of The White Lotus on HBO Max, where she displays her range as a brainy, cynical college student.
She also stars in an interesting movie on Prime Video, The Voyeurs, as a young wife who is drawn into the lives of her seductive neighbors.
Zendaya, who plays Rue, the main character on Euphoria, has never been as good in movies as she is on the show. Still, you can see her in the popular movie Challengers, about romance among tennis players, on Apple TV+, in a role she scowls her way through.
She can also be seen in Dune and its sequel on HBO Max, movies that are much like Star Wars without wookies and ewoks, and where the desert fighters in the tribe she belongs to all wear coils attached to their noses.
The actor will appear in the third Dune movie, which is coming out in December, and she plays Athena in Christopher Nolan’s much-anticipated The Odyssey, which will be released this summer.