Neither by Day Nor by Night

'When I waited for light there came the darkness,' the pretty nurse reading from the Book of Job reminds us. And indeed it does in the shape of this peculiarly awkward story of a bitter-sweet relationship formed in hospital between a cynical expatriate American, a veteran of the Israeli war who is about to go blind, and a short-sighted old girl who mistakes him for a reincarnation of her former lover. Good intentions and a Yiddish flavour abound, but emotional toughness soon gets sacrificed for the sake of a good wallow. Strange that a film which preaches the virtues of 'insight' should handle the theme with such obtuseness. All that pulling in and out of focus, plus a particularly crass sub-Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack, and it's difficult to say whose trials are more gruelling, the characters' or the audience's.