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Border patrols
Identity checks at the 14th Annual Boston Jewish Film Festival
BY PETER KEOUGH

Times have seldom been kind to the Jewish people, but recent developments — the War on Terrorism, the pending invasion of Iraq, the intensifying bloody stalemate between Israelis and Palestinians — verge on the Apocalyptic. Not much of that, however, is immediately apparent in the selections of this year’s Boston Jewish Film Festival. Rather they reflect a mood of contemplation — a meditative pause, perhaps — before the next bout of turmoil. Many of them explore the limits of identity and independence, and also the possibilities of assimilation and inclusion. They feature Jews searching for the roots and rewards of their ancient heritage, and non-Jews trying to get a piece of the action as well.

For example, if it’s okay that Jerry Falwell and Madonna think it’s cool to be Jewish, why not that bubbly gentile imp Amélie? Audrey Tautou as aspiring Parisian model and flighty noodge Michèle flaunts various wigs and religious affectations in Pascale Bailly’s romantic comedy Dieu est grand, je suis toute petite/God Is Great . . . I’m Not (2001; November 7 at 7:30 p.m. at the MFA and November 16 at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, both officially sold out). She’s just going through her post-break-up Buddhist phase when Jewish veterinarian François (Édouard Baer) takes her home from a party and finds her the next morning unconscious from a suicidal overdose. After this melodramatic start, things get cute as Michèle becomes obsessed with Jewish culture, bewildering and annoying the non-practicing François with her Hebrew lessons and mezuzahs. Predictable and tame except in its style and its underlying darkness, Dieu benefits from Bailly’s use of elliptical blackouts (the most crucial events take place between scenes), which infuses the whimsy with irony and melancholy.

The frisson of Tautou gives way to bawdy slapstick in Thomas Gilou’s La vérité si je mens 2/You Shouldn’t Worry! (2001; November 16 at 7 p.m. at the MFA), a sequel to the 1997 French-box-office hit La vérité si je mens/Would I Lie to You? In the earlier film, Eddie (Richard Anconina) is trying to pass so he can gain acceptance in Paris’s Garment District, where he hopes to make his fortune. He’s made the transition and then some in the new film, but his thriving business is taking a beating from the big discount chains, and when he tries to deal with them, they eat him alive. So this film is not so much about an outsider trying to enter a secluded community as it is about a naive but tough troop of underdogs taking on the smug establishment. Given that the spotlight is more on his loutish colleagues than on the low-key Eddie, it’s hard at first to warm to the film, but their rough charm prevails, and the climactic scene, a triumph of costume design, is a comic gem.

Those gentiles on the periphery in Dutch director Frans Weisz’s Qui Vive (2001; November 10 at 8 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner and November 11 at 5:30 p.m. at the MFA, with the director present on Sunday) might need a scorecard to keep track of things in this Holocaust survivors soap opera set in 1982. The non-Jewish Riet sheltered Lea when she was a child seeking refuge from the Nazis during the war, and Pien converted to Judaism after she married Hans, but neither woman really has a clue as to what’s going on when the two of them show up at gatherings of their adopted Jewish family. No wonder. Middle-aged Lea is now married to Hans’s best friend, Nico, whose first wife, Dory, is pregnant with the child of Lea’s father, Simon. Got that? Bear in mind, too, that the film is a sequel to Weisz’s 1989 Leedvermaak. Despite the in medias res confusion, though, the characters and relationships sort one another out, and some — Nico is like a character from J.D. Salinger — take on the perversity and inspiration of real art.

Called heroic for her risking her life to save Lea, Riet points out that its not heroic if you feel there’s no choice. The title character in Gérard Jugnot’s Monsieur Batignole (2001; November 9 at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner) would agree. Played by the director, Jugnot is Parisian butcher Edmond Batignole, who tries to stay uninvolved during the Nazi occupation but is conscience-stricken when his quisling son-in-law denounces the Bernstein family living upstairs. Still, it’s hard to turn down the former neighbors’ spacious apartment, or the catering gigs from the Gestapo. Then Simon, the Bernsteins’ young son, shows up at Edmond’s door. Batignole transcends the mawkishness of this manipulative set-up with poignant humor and pathos; the hero’s last-minute "conversion" is a moving moment of redemption.

A less auspicious conversion marks Rolf Schübel’s Ein Lied von Liebe und Tod/Gloomy Sunday (1999; November 16 at 9:15 p.m. at the MFA) when Hans (Ben Becker) returns to Budapest resplendent in his SS uniform. László (Joachim Król), the Jewish owner of the Restaurant Szábo, saved Hans’s life a few years back after he had thrown himself into the Danube. Hans was heartbroken because Ilona (Erika Marozsán), the beautiful woman László now shares with his pianist, András, had rejected him. But the newly fledged Nazi proves less than grateful as the lovers’ fragile ménage contends with the Third Reich.

In their favor, perhaps, is the title tune, composed, in this fanciful version of a true story, by András. He was the Marilyn Manson of his day, for the song became a worldwide hit, inspiring, so the legend goes, countless suicides around the world (Billie Holiday’s version is like a beckoning revolver at 4 a.m.). Schübel’s film doesn’t quite live up to the song, though its moments of near-farcical melodrama (the opening scene, for one) are tempered by a tone of sardonic irony and wistful weltschmerz.

What tone Russian director Arcadiy Yakhnis’s Shoes from America (2001; November 14 at 8 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, with the director present) is trying for is anyone’s guess. I’d describe it as Andrei Tarkovsky and Samuel Beckett collaborating on a post-Holocaust Fiddler on the Roof, but that would make it sound more interesting than it is. Set in a snowy Ukrainian village shortly after the war, it seems an obscure allegory involving Isaac, an old man sheltered during the Nazi occupation in a cellar by a peasant woman who continually played the accordion for him. Now insane, he awaits the return of his family and the Messiah. Instead his son-in-law and a Gypsy woman show up and join him in his dreary rituals.

The meaning Shoes seems to be driving at is the craving for one’s cultural identity in the midst of chaos and conflict. That theme is explored with more clarity in Heidi Schmidt Emberling’s unpretentious and touching documentary Tangled Roots (2001; November 11 at 6:15 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, with the director present). The daughter of an American Jewish mother and a post-war German immigrant, Schmidt Emberling tries to reconcile her origins by tracing down both sides of her family. As you might expect, her inquiries on the German side prove troubling — her grandfather Fritz served on the Eastern Front. At times the filmmaker’s ingenuousness serves her well, as when she acknowledges that learning of her German grandfather’s ultimate madness consoled her. But family loyalty seems to keep her from the truth — why, for example, did her parents divorce?

The real-life marriage of opposites in Tangled Roots has a fictional counterpart in Lina and Slava Chaplin’s unassuming but slyly devastating A Trumpet in the Wadi (2001; November 9 at 9:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, also sold out). Based on a novel by Israeli writer Sami Michael (who’ll be present), this bittersweet romance finds Alex (Alexander Senderovich, the missing link between Bob Hoskins and Robin Williams), a Russian-Jewish immigrant, in an apartment in the Arab section of Haifa. His downstairs neighbor Huda (Khawlah Hag-Debsy), a Christian Arab, is drawn to the mournful tunes Alex plays at night on his trumpet, and he’s drawn to her kindness, wit, and charm. The obstacles are many but nicely understated — shot in video, the film is both spontaneous and authentic, and the performances make the humor and the sorrow all the keener.

Whereas a Russian tries to put down roots in the Jewish state in Wadi, a Jewish state tries to put down roots in Russia in Yale Strom’s documentary L’Chayim, Comrade Stalin (2002; November 11 at 7:45 p.m. at the MFA, with a fiddle concert by the director following). The Jewish Autonomous Republic of Birobidzhan was a perhaps sinister whim of Stalin’s back in 1928; his plan to set up an independent, Yiddish-speaking Communist state might have been a ploy to lure Jews to the Godforsaken region in the Far East and then do away with them. The story is a fascinating microcosm of Jewish and Soviet history, but Strom’s collection of interviews, archival footage (including Seekers of Happiness, a 1936 Soviet propaganda film about the project), and endless shots of railroad tracks lacks clarity and focus.

Almost as fascinating as the history he’s chronicling is the filmmaker’s own journey to Birobidzhan, since he’s accompanied by a sweaty, anti-Semitic translator who turns out to be a former KGB agent and the son of Mikhail Kalinin, the first president of the Soviet Union. That journey is only an aside in Strom’s film, but one can see it inspiring a whole song or even a novel by Kinky Friedman, the C&W satirist, detective-story novelist, and general cult idol profiled in Simone de Vries’s Kinky Friedman: Proud To Be an Asshole from El Paso (2001; November 10 at 6 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner).

Friedman’s fans range from Willie Nelson to Bill Clinton (who recalls Kinky’s offering him a Cuban cigar at a state dinner with the words, "Don’t think of it as helping their economy — think of it as burning their fields"), and his achievements range from such songs as "They Ain’t Making Jews like Jesus Anymore" to establishing an Animal Rescue Ranch for wayward pets. His celebration of the outcast and his indignation at the entitled are scatological, merciless, and hilarious. In a world on the edge of Armageddon, where all seek an identity to cling to, this is an asshole Jews and non-Jews alike can be proud of.

Issue Date: November 7 - 14, 2002
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