The Other Son Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.0
Overall		4.0

The Other Son Blu-ray Movie Review

Nature vs. nurture?

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 16, 2013

There is probably not a parent alive who hasn’t looked at their child at some point and asked themselves, “Where did you come from?”, or at least joked, "You can't possibly be my child". Kids can be so different from their parents that it’s sometimes a bit amazing, and even kids from the same parents can be like night and day in everything from appearance to food choices (and I say this from personal experience). So when we hear of these oft-told “switched at birth” stories and some wonder “how could they not know that child wasn’t theirs”, I for one want to respond with a hearty, “Easy”. The Other Son takes that general setup which has been fodder for countless Lifetime outings and various movies of the week through the years and refracts it through the prism of the seemingly eternal conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. That gives what is at its core a rather soap operatic plot an unexpectedly potent and poignant perspective, though perhaps strangely, the film isn’t overly political and in fact has a rather surprisingly sanguine attitude about Israeli-Palestinian relations. Fundamentally The Other Son is a film about two families suddenly thrown into unfamiliar territory (no pun intended) when they discover their babies, now approaching eighteen, had been switched at birth. The interpersonal dynamics between the parents and ultimately the boys themselves forms the basis of a fascinating and intimate drama that may have larger issues on it mind, but which has the grace not to foist them on the audience as part of a screed like propaganda effort.

Israel has a requirement that all able bodied young citizens engage in some form of civil service, and for Joseph Silberg (Jules Sitruk) that means joining the Israeli Defense Forces. That in turn leads to a blood test where a stunning discovery is made: Joseph cannot possibly be the child of his supposed parents, Alon (Pascal Elbé) and Orith (Emmanuelle Devos). Ironically it turns out that the long roiling tensions in the Middle East led to the horrifying mixup when during a bombing attack and resultant evacuation of a hospital, two new mothers were given the wrong babies during the ensuing chaos. Even more troubling is the fact that the other family turns out to be Palestinians, the Al Bezaaz family, consisting of Yacine (Mehdi Dehbi), who is in reality the Silberg’s son, as well as Yacine’s parents Leila (Oreen Amari) and Said (Khalifa Natour).

Part of the emotional impact of The Other Son is watching the unfolding realization on the part of these two young men as they come to terms with the fact that they’re not whom they’ve thought of themselves as being. It may sound like an impossible, or at least improbable, thing to happen to anyone, but as repeated news reports over the years have proven, these mixups do actually occur from time to time. If I might be permitted a brief sidebar into autobiography, in my own personal experience, I had something at least somewhat similar happen. I grew up as the child of a so-called “mixed marriage” between a Jew and a Christian, although my father’s Judaism was never mentioned in our home life (I know some may find this hard to believe, but it's the absolute truth). Orphaned at an early age and left to fend for himself in a variety of foster homes, my father had come from an immigrant generation that wanted more than anything to assimilate, to blend in to the so-called melting pot, and to not be defined by his previous nationality or supposed religion, and in fact my sisters and I found out later that he had never divulged his background even to my mother (again, hard to believe, but true). Though my sisters and I always suspected we had this ethnic identity, it wasn’t until we were clearly informed by our Uncles (my father’s brothers) of our background that we had “proof”, and even then, my father refused to discuss it and my mother refused to believe it. When my eldest sister ended up living in London for several years, she was able to track down birth certificates for my father and his siblings as well as marriage certificates and other data of our long deceased paternal grandparents, all of which clearly showed our Jewish heritage (my father had even changed his original Hebrew name to an Americanized form sometime in his teen years). This might seem like a minor “revelation” compared to what the kids in The Other Son go through, but it perhaps illuminates how many of us find out things about our past or our families that suddenly put everything we’ve experienced in a completely new light.

Co-writer and director Lorraine Lévy does a commendable job in personalizing the age old conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis, but perhaps even more importantly, she attempts to peek beneath the surface of how we all tend to identify ourselves within our particular family unit. The relationships between the parents are fascinating to behold in this film. The fathers are both like boxers, having retreated into their various corners before engaging each other in a sociopolitical ring, while the mothers (perhaps expectedly) tend to view things more from an emotional angle. But there are fascinating little moments between the husbands and wives themselves, including intimations of guilt at not having recognized they ended up with the wrong child.

The most moving elements here are the interactions between Joseph and Yacine, two young men on the cusp of real adulthood (we’ll forego the traditional Jewish custom of anointing a 13 year old male an adult after his Bar Mitzvah) who suddenly have to figure out who they are, both individually and in this new forced relationship with each other. Joseph has to come to terms with suddenly not being Jewish (incredibly his Rabbi tells him he’ll have to convert in order to be recognized, something that I, too, have heard through my life since only my father was Jewish and I’m therefore not considered to be “really” a Jew by the Orthodox and Conservative wings of the religion). Yacine on the other hand has to deal with his supposed brother Bilal (Mahmood Shilabi), who somewhat akin to the Rabbi in Joseph’s life, completely ignores Yacine’s history and decides his “onetime” brother is now The Enemy.

Perhaps the most salient philosophical point that Lévy is positing to the audience is that labels are meaningless. Yacine and Joseph are still the admirable young men they have always been, no matter what nationality and/or religion they’ve been raised in and no matter what choices they make going forward. Some may be put off by the almost nonchalant conclusions that Lévy comes to in the film’s closing act, but that may in fact be part of her design, to let us all know that no matter how seemingly traumatic the issues we confront, there are at least semi-happy endings to be found if only we look hard enough for them.

The Other Son Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Other Son is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Cohen Media Group and Entertainment One with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. Lévy has utilized a lot of varied location elements in the film, and we get everything from the depressing Berlin Wall-like fortress separating Israel from the Palestinian territories to some really lovely moments on the pure white sands of an Israeli beach. The film has a kind of quasi-verité look at times, albeit with a bit more gloss and luster than that idiom regularly displays. This high definition presentation offers a nicely sharp image with excellently accurate and well saturated color. Close-ups reveal excellent fine object detail, and contrast is very strong and consistent throughout the presentation. There are no compression artifacts of any note to report, and the transfer retains a very natural look.

The Other Son Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Other Son features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix that is in a variety of languages, including French, English, Hebrew and Arabic. The sound mix here offers some nice immersion and well placed ambient environmental effects. The bulk of the film is in fairly small scale dialogue scenes, but when things open up (as in some of the beach sequences), there's admirable depth and discrete channelization, nicely recreating a very realistic soundfield. Fidelity is excellent though as should be expected dynamic range is fairly limited.

The Other Son Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2:07)


• Making of Featurette (1080p; 30:47) features some good interviews with Lorraine Lévy as well as some interesting behind the scenes footage. Some of the source elements here were obviously mastered from video and have some quality issues.


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 9:21)


• Bloopers (1080p; 3:09) prove that funny things can happen even during the shooting of a dramatic film like this.

The Other Son Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Perhaps due to my own "secret identity" issues (as outlined above), The Other Son hit really close to home for me, and I was entranced by its quiet but powerful examination of some pretty weighty issues. The film features uniformly excellent performances and some unusually subtle writing which thankfully doesn't beat the viewer over the head with what could have been a screed like examination of the seemingly insurmountable issues between Israelis and Palestinians. Lévy may be a "cockeyed optimist" (to borrow a Rodgers and Hammerstein term), but her approach actually ends up being uplifting, which is perhaps exactly what this conflict needs, rather than endless rehashings of either perceived or actual wrongs done through countless millennia. This Blu-ray offers superior video and audio and comes Highly recommended.