The sixth annual Tampa Bay Jewish Film Festival rolls into Tampa Theatre this year from Feb. 28 to March 3, bringing with it five new movies that touch on aspects of the Jewish experience from France to North Africa to Belgium to Wales, with several stops in between. The films cover a wide range of bases, from poignant dramatic fare to bodice-busting romances to quirky comedies, offering a little something for pretty much everyone, not excluding those who don't happen to be of the Jewish persuasion. With one borderline masterpiece in the lineup and only one clunker in the batch, this promises to be a solid if not quite spectacular festival, and certainly an aesthetic step up from last year's event in almost every way.
Only five films are being screened, so it's a bit difficult to get a sense of what sort of identity our local Jewish Film Festival is trying to project for itself. From the looks of this year's lineup, though, the words safe and, possibly, transitional spring to mind. Most of this year's movies seem to be skewed a bit older and a bit more conservative than what we've seen from this festival in the past — or, for that matter, from what you'd find on screens at major Jewish Film Festivals in San Francisco and other parts of the country — and, while the majority of the films in the 2002 Tampa Bay festival are entertaining enough, none of them (with the exception of the festival's standout, Fighter) really attempt to dig very deep or do anything new.
At the very least, one might have hoped that this year's JFF would have taken the bull by the horns and attempted to program at least one film that addressed issues directly or indirectly connected with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a topic very much on everyone's mind, particularly since America's own firsthand taste of Islamic terrorism on Sept. 11. With so much of the Western media — not excluding, on a local level, our own St. Petersburg Times and the paper you are now reading — leaping to the defense of Palestinian "underdogs," it's a pity this festival did not seize the opportunity to present another side to this increasingly muddled story.
The festival gets underway on Thursday, Feb. 28, with what is, owing to some inexplicable miscalculation on the part of the festival's programmers, probably the weakest offering in the entire lineup. The French import Dad on the Run (the considerably less mellifluous, English title for Cours Tourjours) wants very badly to be a madcap comedy but doesn't often give us very much to laugh at. Clement Sibony stars as Jonas, a young Parisian Jew of North African descent, who's just become a brand new dad.
When Jonas is informed of an obscure family tradition that requires a new father go out and bury his son's foreskin, the movie simply and literally becomes a case of one damn thing after another. Our bumbling hero transforms into a sort of human pinball, bouncing from mishap to mishap as he lurches from a cheesy bar mitzvah to the streets of Paris, encountering a seemingly limitless supply of self-consciously quirky characters.
There's not much by way of a plot here, just one slapsticky chase scene after another, peopled by a cast of mildly amusing oddballs and set to a score of loopy klezmer music. Dad on the Run is generally cute and colorful, but much of the humor doesn't seem to translate all that well from the French and, frankly, probably wasn't all that funny to begin with.
As is its custom, the festival takes a break on Friday night and Saturday day in observance of the Jewish sabbath, returning on Saturday evening with a double dose of films. Both movies slated for Saturday should prove to be fairly big crowd pleasers, with the 8 p.m. offering, Left Luggage, probably turning out to be one of the most popular entries in the festival. In fact, the film already briefly played the Bay area a few months ago and has apparently accumulated a very positive local buzz.
Left Luggage stars Laura Fraser (Titus) as Chaja, a hedonistic and spiritually bankrupt college student and the daughter of Holocaust survivors. The film is heartfelt but somewhat heavy-handed as it details the inevitable spiritual journey taken by Chaja when she finds herself bonding with the adorable little Hasidic boy to whom she becomes a nanny. There's not a great deal of subtlety here, and the narrative sometimes verges on the banal, but Left Luggage is, all in all, a satisfying experience. Much of the acting is quite remarkable — particularly the performances by Fraser and Isabella Rossellini as the Hasidic boy's mother — and the film neither trivializes its Hasidic characters nor does it attempt to turn them into Jewish saints. Rather, Left Luggage displays a welcome curiosity and respect for Hasidic culture, dramatizing it with a level of accuracy that's rarely been seen on screen. The movie takes place in Antwerp, Belgium, in the early '70s, but the basic themes and ideas here are so universal that it could have been set almost anywhere and anytime during the last half-century.
A complimentary dessert reception will be held immediately after the presentation of Left Luggage, followed by the 10 p.m. screening of Solomon and Gaenor. A Romeo and Juliet story set in rural Wales during the first years of the 20th century, Solomon and Gaenor is a beautifully shot tale of star-crossed lovers and the larger culture clash that engulfs them.
Solomon and Gaenor are in love. He's a Yiddish-speaking Jew (who initially conceals his true identity from her); she's the bashful daughter of a pious, Christian coal miner. They meet cute, couple like crazy during the film's first hour, and then watch the sparks fly (the bad kind of sparks) when the rest of their insular little community gets wind of their love connection. The film is basically just another somewhat predictable variation on an overly familiar scenario, but it does manage to get in a few good licks about the links between poverty and racism. Director Paul Morrison has turned in a respectable enough fiction debut, but one that's not nearly as intriguing as his previous documentary efforts in which aspects of Jewish identity in the U.K. are examined.
Just when things should be winding down, on the festival's final day, is when this event really kicks into gear. Fighter, which screens at 1 p.m. on Sunday, is not only the fest's best film, it's also one of the finest documentaries of the past several years. Fighter uses interviews, archival footage and some very unusual travel footage to bring us into the individual stories and complex friendship of two wise, witty and very cantankerous seventysomethings who survived the Holocaust. That's all that should really be said about this remarkable film, inasmuch as it's one of those movies best experienced with as few preconceptions as possible. Less is definitely more in this case, but suffice it to say that this thoughtful, spunky, funny and unexpectedly moving film is an absolute must-see.
If your brain and eyes haven't been overwhelmed by all this Semitic cinema, you can catch the festival's final offering, Trailers Schmailers, at 3:30 p.m. Sunday. Essentially just an 86-minute string of trailers from various movies featuring Jewish actors or somehow dealing with Jewish stories or characters, Trailers Schmailers offers a little bit of the good (The Shop on Main Street, Shindler's List, a clever trailer for Woody Allen's Bananas), the bad (Portnoy's Complaint, Sidney Lumet's Hasidic nightmare A Stranger Among Us) and the ugly (a whole block of trailers for Barbra Streisand movies). Most of the mini-movies here will be familiar to almost everyone, but there are a handful of interesting obscurities (Zero Mostel and Harry Belafonte in The Angel Levine), a few unintentionally hilarious moments (a voice-over, for Judith, of Sophia Loren screaming that "her body was a weapon … a weapon she was willing to use!") as well as some very welcome glimpses of Judy Garland and Montgomery Clift chewing up the carpet in Judgment at Nuremberg. There are no clips of John Garfield or Edward G. Robinson but hey, you can't have everything.
STAR-CROSSED LOVERS: Solomon and Gaenor screens 10 p.m. Saturday, March 2, at the Jewish Film Festival.
This article appears in Feb 27 – Mar 5, 2002.