Day Trippers, written and directed by Veronica “Roni” Kedar, opened Thursday throughout Israel, and it’s a playful, sweet story of two women, one British and one Israeli, spending a day getting high together in Amsterdam.
Gradually, the story deepens, and we learn what each woman has come to Amsterdam to escape. While they have fun under the influence of magic mushrooms, they still have issues to sort out and are searching for a way to make their lives more meaningful, in a story that just about anyone can relate to – especially young Israelis who often take off with their backpacks to try to forget whatever is difficult back home.
It’s a story that brings to mind movies about strangers connecting, such as Lost in Translation and Before Sunrise, which Kedar has said were among her inspirations for Day Trippers.
Naama Amit, the actress who plays the Israeli Ruth, has worked a great deal in theater, but Day Trippers is one of her first starring roles on film. When I told her the movie was fun to watch and asked if it had been fun to make, she lit up, unlike many actors who tend to be a little jaded in interviews.
“I’m very happy that it was fun to watch because it really was lots of fun to make it,” she said.
What is the movie 'Day Trippers' about?
The movie opens when the two heroines meet on a street in the center of Amsterdam filled with shops selling legal drugs. Zoe (Nell Barlow), is just 17 and left behind a difficult family situation at home but isn’t old enough to buy the mushrooms she wants to take. Ruth, a writer in her 30s, has problems in her relationship back in Israel and just wants to travel.
When Zoe asks Ruth to buy her the mushrooms, she invites the Israeli woman to take them with her. Ruth agrees and they spend a day doing silly stuff around the city, including buying beautiful costumes in a secondhand store. As the drugs take effect, the movie uses off-kilter camera angles, brightly colored animation, and inventive music to portray their altered consciousness.
“It’s so nice to do what you really want… Imagine living without caring about what other people think,” says Ruth. But as they come down from their high, Zoe confesses it’s not so easy to know what she really wants, and Ruth is forced to come to terms with the consequences of her decision to flee to Amsterdam. Both grapple with whether the insights they reached during the day actually mean something and if the bond they formed is real and lasting.
AMIT ADMITTED that she had undergone a parallel journey to Ruth during the making of the film and the period following its completion. The movie was filmed two years ago and its release was postponed due to the war.
“When I look back on that time, March two years ago, it’s like a different world,” she said. “When I saw it at the first screening [at the Haifa International Film Festival], I was thinking, ‘Who’s that and what world is she living in?’ It seems that we were so innocent then… It’s always nice to film in beautiful places and get away from here for a little bit, and looking back, it seems almost surrealistic.”
Asked what it was like to play someone who is high for a good portion of the movie and how she prepared, she laughed, saying, “I did research.” She said that she had never actually taken anything hallucinogenic, but she felt she understood enough from having smoked an occasional joint or had a glass of wine.
“If you’re an actor, even if you don’t take the drugs, you can radiate that feeling of being high. It was very freeing.”
Like Ruth, she also developed a strong connection to her co-star. “She was wonderful to work with,” said Amit. “We laughed a lot making it. She has this special British sense of humor.”
Day Trippers often feels as if the two actresses are improvising, but Amit said that wasn’t the case. “I think Roni’s genius is that she gives actors a feeling of freedom, but we were totally faithful to the text,” she said, speaking about the director, who is her partner both personally and professionally.
“At certain points, she took a few moments and ideas that came up in rehearsals and added them to the script, but we were very precise and stuck to the text. When Roni wanted something different, when she wanted us to go off-script for a minute, she asked for it. We were so ready, so sure of our parts, we could be free when she wanted that.”
Sometimes, Amit said, she would tell her less experienced co-star, “Don’t worry about the camera, don’t worry about the people hanging around in the park, these are just people. There’s no cameraman, no director, no technical crew. There’s only us, and the city. I think we managed to create a bubble where it was just us.”
Kedar, who has made such films as Joe + Belle and Family, wrote the script in a burst of inspiration in just a few days. It moved Amit as soon as she read it, because she felt an intense connection to her character. She is excited that it is now in theaters and thinks audiences will be able to relate to the need of the characters to escape reality, however briefly, during these difficult times.
“I can say, personally, that it took me a long time to say, now I’m going to do what I want to do, to let go of everything that’s superficial in my life,” she said. “In the movie, the characters just up and fly to Amsterdam, but everyone has their own Amsterdam.”
