NYJFF Dispatch.

I suppose the simple definition of a Jewish film festival is a festival of films by or about Jews. Broad enough? The Jewish Film Archive Online lists such movies as Borat, The History Boys and For Your Consideration. You could find plenty more unlikely candidates that could fit.

The New York Jewish Film Festival, the collaboration between the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the Jewish Museum that runs through January 25, is nothing if not a mixed bag - comedies, melodramas, historical tales, anything Israeli, and docs about everything from restaurateurs to Gulag prisoners. Here, at least, the big screen starts to look like what the Republicans used to call the "big tent."

There's a lot about the festival's opening film, My Mexican Shivah, that makes it look a lot like films that you've seen at a lot of Jewish film festivals. It's a dysfunctional family gathering in Mexico, but it could take place anywhere on the screen in the diaspora, and not just there. Bear in mind that there are also films like this that have been made in Israel (see Passover Fever, 1995).

The setting is the comfortable home of Moishe, a patriarch who has just died of a heart attack in Mexico City. In case you haven't guessed, everyone shows up in the best of clothes to sit shivah after the funeral - the widow, envious cousins, a bad-ass baal teshuva (born-again returnee to orthodoxy), the lusty granddaughter who's still got eyes for her now-orthodox cousin, creditors, a band of mariachis (although the music is by the Klezmatics), and the Catholic mistress, to name just a few. In case you haven't guessed, mourning isn't ennobling for this family. It's more of a shake-well-and-serve drama, a bawdy mosaic.

You've seen this film before, set at weddings or at raucous dinner tables. Alejandro Springall is up to the job, directing the adaptation of a story by Ilán Stavans, which is produced by John Sayles and Maggie Renzi (so far as I know, it's their latest project since the undeserved box office still-birth in 2004 of the funny and wise political allegory, Silver City [... though they have just wrapped Honeydripper - dwh]). Springal and his actors are trying hard to charm. If you're in the right mood, My Mexican Shivah could convince you either to visit or avoid your next family event. It's likely to make the rounds of Jewish film festivals this season. Whether it plays anywhere else is the big question.

A film at the festival that does not try hard to charm is Gorgeous!, Lisa Anzuelos's comedy (if you accept the official description of the movie), with an ensemble cast built around a quartet of women from Moroccan Sephardic families. The story follows the ups and downs of frustrated women looking for love and mostly failing at it. Money doesn't seem to be much of a problem for Isa, who runs a massage spa with her mother and sister-in-law, and is being audited by the French equivalent of the IRS. Fortunately, the man whom she knocked from his bicycle with her new SUV (and then slept with) is Jewish, an accountant, and smitten enough with her to correct the firm's books for free. It's by no means the most preposterous situation in Gorgeous!.

The film is better understood through its French title - Comme t'y es belle!, or "You Sure Are Beautiful" - which is the kind of thing that friends of the sort that we meet in this film tend to say to each other, even if they don't mean it most of the time. Remember, the action is set around a spa where women spend their time and money trying to look beautiful - not an easy ideal to achieve in a place like Paris, or for women who are painfully aware that their looks are fading, and painfully looking for men. The family gatherings, like those in My Mexican Shiva, are merciless. To make things worse, the neurotic, contentious and self-destructive girls have each other, and their cell phones. Think of Sex and the City - then add the French, and the schtick.

There isn't much plot to give away in this long sitcom. Be warned that the French have a very different sense of humor than Americans. The French will see the film as a sex comedy; Americans watching Gorgeous may see it more as a melodrama. Implausibility may also scare Americans away. Toward the end, the extended family gathered at the Passover table watches a French game show called Pesach, a sort of Trivial Pursuit for the holy day. Another plot twist has Isa entering a civil union, a French version of a lesbian "green card" marriage, to enable her Arab au pair to stay in France legally. You may very well recognize someone from your life in this knotted script. Whether you want to spend 90 minutes with that person is another story.

There's an ensemble cast in the documentary, The Longing: The Forgotten Jews of South America, comprised largely of aspirants to Judaism from Colombia and Ecuador who believe themselves to be descendants of Crypto-Jews, the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula who practiced Judaism in secret when they emigrated to the New World. Gabriela Bohm, the filmmaker, estimates that some 18 million Latin Americans could be descended from Jewish ancestors. Reclaiming their ancestry turns out to be harder than it sounds.

A century ago, the Yiddish theater was full of plays about Jews who sought to hide their Jewishness in societies where Jews were unwelcome. In Guayaquil, Ecuador, a half-dozen determined souls from modest backgrounds can't find a rabbi to supervise their conversion in a town where the one synagogue happens to be firmly orthodox. There isn't even a rabbi, so they turn to the Internet and find one, a Spanish-speaking Reform rabbi from Kansas City, who takes on the mission and flies down. There's a poignancy to the bond that he forms with people that he's never encountered back in Kansas City. Faith conquers all, right? Not in Ecuador, where the existing Jews have no interest in the Cryptos - an aversion of European Jews to Latin Americans who may or may not have had Sephardic ancestors, suggests Gabriela Bohm.

Jews have faced greater obstacles over the last 4000 years, but the stonewalling of the local community threatens to keep these "Lost Jews" lost. A rabbi in the Ecuadorian capital of Quito says that a Jew can be a Jew on a mountaintop in the Himalayas. These Crypto-Jews learn that finding a Jewish community is more of a challenge than converting.

Posted by dwhudson at January 15, 2007 3:34 AM