Yidl class

The perils of Orthodoxy; another 10 best

Marlene Booth, filmmaker of Yidl in the Middle: Growing Up Jewish in Iowa (at the MFA through January 20), lives, married with kinder, in the People's Republic of Cambridge. There, sticking out in the multicultural crowd isn't being Jewish but saying no to portobellos. But she was raised in the '50s and early '60s in Des Moines, then 98 percent Pleasantville Christian. As she explains in her thoughtful, entertaining personal documentary (a deserved hit at the recent Boston Jewish Film Festival), she worried all the time about what the goyim would think if she made her Orthodox Judaism obvious to them.

An early problem in the 1950s was the Rosenbergs, executed after allegedly passing state secrets to the Communists. "We had to be nice so people wouldn't think all Jews were like that," her patriotic mother warned Marlene. And then there was that traumatic day, after Marlene proudly explained Chanukkah to her first-grade class, when a shiksa schoolmate insidiously whispered, "Do you see her? She doesn't believe in Jesus!"

Marlene's conclusion: "Being Jewish was not for show-and-tell." And so she grew up with a split consciousness. On the one hand, she was a beaming, affable Midwesterner who could believe, "Iowa was a great place to grow up. Most people were salt-of-the-earth farmer stock, the nicest people on earth." On the other hand, she would keep secret from them her Hebraic soul, her deepest identity, which was unveiled at thrice-a-week visits to Beth-El Jacob shul, what she called "my second home."

Booth has never changed -- and so this film, and her confession that, about her life-long devout Judaism, "I felt different all the time, even ashamed." How, she wondered, could she love so completely her Jewishness and yet never shed her childhood embarrassment about being identified publicly by her religion?

My favorite part of Yidl in the Middle is the least programmed, the least controlled by voiceover, when Booth goes home for her Roosevelt High 30th reunion with a movie crew. She forces herself, in having to explain the camera to her one-time schoolmates, to say out loud that she is Jewish . . . and to say it in Des Moines. There's a priceless meeting with the turned-up-nose blonde beauty queen, still a knockout; and the two females are still at cross-purposes. Now the ex-queen wishes she'd picked out Jewish friends at Roosevelt "for the stimulation and camaraderie," and because she might have studied harder. Marlene can only mutter, "I would have died to look like you."

When Booth grew up in Iowa, one of five children, many of her relatives also congregated there. Now 21 out of 22 have moved elsewhere: for her it's, sadly, a Des Moines diaspora. She herself tried living in Israel for a time, where she felt very American; and then she came to Massachusetts, where she raised a religious family, made a series of documentaries about Judaism in America, and even started a Hebrew school. Why reside in Cambridge? For Booth, it's a halfway point, she says, between Iowa and Jerusalem!

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Continuing its "Boston Film Artists Present series," the MFA is offering a January 9 double bill of two short films, Jonathan Segal's Ripple and Thomas Bacon's Coat Check.

A public screening of Ripple is hard to explain. It seems like an in-house audition (shot expensively on the back lot at Paramount Pictures) whose only raison d'être is to demonstrate the filmmaker's ability to maneuver a Steadicam. The interconnecting story is TV-glossy and totally shallow.

Surviving some schmaltzy excesses, Coat Check is the more affecting work, a tender micro-tale of the last nights of employment of an aging coat checker in an out-of-fashion nightclub. There are a couple of nifty Wellesian deep-focus shots through the coat-check room onto the dance floor, and there's a deftly daffy performance by a Nancy Reagan-sized veteran actress who looks like Reagan's other wife, Jane Wyman.

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A belated appreciation of the movies of 1998 (and with due frustration over how few foreign-language films and documentaries opened in Boston):

* Best Film: Takeshi "Beat" Kitano's Fireworks.

* Best Hollywood Film: Steven Soderbergh's Out of Sight.

* Best American Indie: Todd Solondz's Happiness.

* The Rest of the 10 Best: Wes Anderson's Rushmore; Alexei Balabanov's Brother; Neil Jordan's The Butcher Boy; Chris Eyre's Smoke Signals; Vincent Gallo's Buffalo 66; Adrian Lyne's Lolita; Jesse Peretz's First Love, Last Rites.

* Most Underrated Film: Raúl Ruiz's Shattered Image.

* Best Documentary: Barbara Kopple's Wild Man Blues.

* Best Comedy: Tamara Jenkins's Slums of Beverly Hills.

* Best Animated Film: George Miller's Babe: Pig in the City.

* Best (Semi) Musical Film: Tony Gatlif's Gadjo Dilo.

* Best Genre Film: Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan.

* Best Experimental Film: Alexandr Sokurov's Mother and Son.

* Best Surprise of a Film: Ted Demme's Monument Ave.

* Best Local Film: Martha Swetzoff's Theme: Murder.

* Best Actor: Kris Kristofferson in A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries.

* Best Actress: Hope Davis in Next Stop, Wonderland.

* Best Cinematography: John Toll for The Thin Red Line.