No matter how many times you see a Jewish man ‘teaching’ a Muslim how to act like a Jew, it’s funny. Especially when the actors in question are The West Wing’s Richard Schiff, Jewish in real life, and Omid Djalili, playing a north London Muslim of Pakistani descent. Djalili’s attempts at the shrug, the oy veys and strangling the language is laugh out loud comedy every time…
The set-up is simple – Djalili is Mahmud Nasir, a British Muslim who works at a London cab firm. He is not the strictest Muslim – he likes his football, the odd drink and would rather play with his two charming children than pray five times a day. He then discovers he was adopted, and not only that but his birth parents were Jewish, and his real name is Solly Shimshellewitz. He befriends rival cabbie Lenny (Schiff) and tries to learn how to ‘be Jewish’ so he can gain entry into the home where he believes his real father lies dying.
Here’s where the heart of the comedy is. Lenny teaches Solly all the tricks of the trade, then takes Solly to a Bar Mitzvah, with chaotic results. However, as Solly is embracing his new Jewish identity, his family are appalled – his gorgeous wife Saamiya (Panjabi) leaves him – she thought he was having an affair, or gay, but this is worse – and his adorable daughter calls him an ‘infidel’. Worse, his son Rashid (Amit Shah) is planning to marry Uzma (Soraya Radford) but her stepfather is a fanatical Muslim who will forbid the bond if Nasir is not strict enough – so Rashid is furious with his dad.
It’s to the film’s huge credit that it takes on this highly sensitive material and makes it funny – writer David Baddiel has said ‘people are terrified, and when they are terrified, what they should really do is laugh’. The gag count is very high and hits all targets equally…
War is always hell on the grunts carrying it out. But a war mired in politics takes an additional emotional and psychological toll. Who wants to be the last soldier killed for a discredited policy?
This isn’t Vietnam or Iraq. Beaufort is the “beautiful fortress” (known as Shqif Arnun, “High Rock” in Arabic) that has been strategically and symbolically overlooking centuries of failed policies along the scenic road to Damascus. Originally a Roman encampment, it was built up by the Crusaders in the 12th century, expanded by Muslims in the 13th century, controlled by the PLO during the 1970s civil war in Lebanon, and then captured by the Israeli army in 1982 as they invaded the southern part of the country. Beaufort is set in 2000 as protesting Israeli citizens and Hezbollah fighters pressure the army to retreat.
Bomb expert Ziv Farran (Ohad Knoller, The Bubble’s hunk) arrives by helicopter amidst repetitive announcements of mortar alerts. The hand-held camera follows him into the fortress through the dark, endless, confusing sandbagged tunnels to a confrontation with determined Sergeant Liberti (Oshri Cohen), to whom he insists that the mined road is too dangerous to navigate. But with the enemy also launching increasingly accurate blasts, no supplies are coming in, and no men are getting out until the road is cleared. Tension mounts as personalities clash while the men wait for orders from higher-ups on how to proceed. Visually telling much of the story, Ofer Inov’s striking cinematography captures the smoke-filled redoubts, truck convoys maneuvering in the dark, and the mountain sunrises and sunsets.
The intense waiting highlights the differences among the band of brothers who are intimately restricted to an area as claustrophobic as a World War I-set trench or a World War II submarine. (In the English translation of journalist Ron Leshem’s novel, the living quarters are, in fact, nicknamed “the submarine” by the soldiers). While some of their ethnic, class, geographic, and religious differences are not as clear to non-Israelis as in Cedar’s earlier films dealing with societal stress lines (Time of Favor and Campfire), the soldiers bond around the usual teasing and earthy diversions of young men committed to die for each other.
In a war that’s ironically just a short flight from home, Oshri (Eli Eltonyo) counts the days until his tour of duty is over, with a small U.S. flag reminding him of his girlfriend waiting in New Jersey. But Ziv volunteered for the mission because his uncle was killed taking the mountain, though his father, active in peace groups, demands withdrawal. All are too aware that their split-second decisions are also being watched and argued about at home, as they can see from the Israeli newscasts – that’s how they learn the Cabinet has set the date for their evacuation. While casualties mount as they wait and wait for new orders they are not sure they want to follow, they frankly debate if they are nothing more than just cannon fodder.
Like a diary, the novel is made up of Sergeant Liberti’s vivid first-person impressions over several years. Here, he is an enigma gradually unwrapped to be the film’s emotional center, a powerful portrait of an officer facing up to what it means to serve in an army of a fallible, democratic country that spins an explosive pyrrhic victory. As Norman Thomas said about soldiers in another disputed war, these pawns bleed.
José (Fernando Luján) has been divorced from Nora for 20 years. They were married at least as long. Now he keeps an apartment across from hers; she spies on him with her binoculars. And when, just before Passover, she succeeds after decades of suicide attempts, José is convinced she planned for him to discover her body—and the full Seder meal prepared in carefully labeled Tupperware.
Nora’s Will takes place almost entirely in the apartment that José and Nora once shared, where seemingly not a stick of furniture has been bought since he left. There are no teeth gnashed or breasts beat during the mourning period. Rabbi, family, and servants come and go around José, who is ironic rather than visibly bereaved, a lapsed Jew who wolfs ham pizza in front of his abstaining co-religionists. Logistical problems, such as finding a Hebrew cemetery in Mexico City that will accept the body of a suicide, worry away José’s stoicism—along with inchoate feelings stirred up by a stray photograph from 1969, suggesting another lover in the dead woman’s life, as in a De Maupassant story.
Throughout, writer/director Mariana Chenillo and Luján carefully unwrap José’s defensive postures to reveal a hard center of unresolved emotion, shown finally.
Gloomy Sunday is a hauntingly beautiful gem of a movie, a unique blending of romance, drama, and tragedy all compressed under the relentless weight of history. The film lives and breathes, transporting viewers back to 1930s Budapest with beautiful cinematography, a fascinatingly poignant musical component, and the most human of characters. Known as the Hungarian suicide song, “Gloomy Sunday” forms the backdrop for the film and its characters. The film ran for a record-breaking 70 weeks in Boston.
Deutscher Filmpreis 2000: Best Screenplay
Bavarian Film Awards 2000: Best Director, Best Cinematography
The Front, the Festival’s first film retrospective, is a 1976 film about the blacklist during the age of live television written by Walter Bernstein, directed by Martin Ritt and starring Woody Allen and Zero Mostel. Because of the blacklist, a number of artists, writers, directors and others were rendered unemployable, having been accused of subversive political activities in support of communism or of actually being communists themselves. Howard Prince (Woody Allen), an apolitical man who needs money, agrees to become a front, signing his name to scripts submitted to a television network. Combining comedy and pathos, the film enlightens the viewer to the emotional consequences of blacklisting.
1977 Academy Award nominee for Original Screenplay
1977 BAFTA nominee for Best Supporting Actor – Zero Mostel 1977 Glolden Globe nominee for New Star of the Year – Andrea Marcovicci
