Love Comes Lately.

Ella Taylor in the Voice on Love Comes Lately: "The mercurial spirit and gnomic intellect of Isaac Bashevis Singer are properly difficult to trap in a bottle, but German director Jan Schütte comes as close as any in this atmospheric, exhilaratingly ambitious chamber piece that weaves the great Yiddish writer's life and obsessions with three of his seminal stories."

Michael Koresky at indieWIRE: "With its main narrative thread interrupted by tangential fictions and dream sequences, Love Comes Lately often comes across as a less randy version of Woody Allen's Deconstructing Harry (which was in turn a far more randy remake of Bergman's Wild Strawberries); it's a mostly benign affair, though, and it doesn't probe far enough into its protagonist's deep-rooted neuroses or octogenarian sexual hang-ups."

"There have been several other films over the years based on Singer's works, but none with such relevance as Love Comes Lately to Singer's own description of his subjects," writes Andrew Sarris in the New York Observer and then gives us the quote:

I deal with unique characters in unique circumstances... a group of people who are still a riddle in the world and often to themselves - the Jews of Eastern Europe, specifically the Yiddish-speaking Jews who perished in Poland and those who emigrated to the USA. The longer I live with them and write about them, the more I am baffled about the richness of their individuality (since I am one of them) by my own whims and passions. While I hope and pray for the redemption and resurrection, I dare to say that for me, these people are living right now, in literature, as in our dreams, death does not exist.

"Max Kohn (Otto Tausig), the aging Lothario of Love Comes Lately, is very much like the movie itself: doddering and milquetoasty, but ultimately disarming," writes Nathan Lee in the New York Times.

This "is really a story about sex and death, not love," writes Ruth Graham in the New York Sun. "It's about the question of 'why people are born and why they must die' - everything in between is optional, of course - and how they amuse themselves as they approach the latter dismal requirement."

Posted by dwhudson at June 13, 2008 2:55 PM