The Matchmaker is an awfully familiar movie.
It’s set in Haifa, Israel in 1968, but the place and time could almost as easily be the 1930s Italy of Fellini’s Amarcord or Giuseppe Tornatore’s Baaria or the postwar Italy of Tornatore’s Cinema Paradiso. It shares with these films, and many others, a sepia-toned coming-of-age nostalgia, in which in a young protagonist learns the ways of the world in a period of global tumult.
In the time of The Matchmaker, these worldwide changes are, of course, taking place in Vietnam, Paris and New York, of which the film reminds us in period-reducing voice-over clichés and soundtrack selections – just wait until the unironic employment of Steppenwolf’s Magic Carpet Ride a little bit later.
Director Avi Nesher is a veteran movie technician in Israel, but his style is sentimental, undistinguished and fundamentally borrowed from the prestige-art-cinema lexicon. In addition to the ambience cribbed from the aforementioned titles, much of its story reminded me of Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses: Upon meeting Yankele Bride (Adir Miller), a lumbering stranger claiming to be a matchmaker, adolescent Arik (Tuval Shafir), an enthusiast of American detective novels, becomes the older man’s protégé, sleuthing out potential lovelorn clients for Yankele’s business.
Neither of them are particularly good at what they do, which is part of the film’s charm and, like Truffaut, Nesher writes and directs with deep reservoirs of sympathy for everyone involved, from a cinema-operating dwarf to a nebbish librarian to Tamara (Neta Porat), a sexually adventurous Iraqi neighbor who moves in next door and sets Arik’s loins aflutter. The Matchmaker is rich with robust stories.
The film draws most of its appeal from the performance of Miller. He has enjoyed few acting credits prior to this, but he’s blessed with charisma compelling enough for Hollywood, creating a sort of tragic patriarch out of a delinquent huckster. He looks particularly out of place in a well-pressed suit and fedora, speaking clipped Hebrew, a mysterious scar snaking across his face, suggesting the kind of trouble nobody in the town wants to confront.
This movie is set in a place, after all, that only came into existence 20 years earlier, and is still dealing with its own fresh scars of the Holocaust. The adults prefer not to discuss the concentration camps, but to the younger characters, it makes for fascinating recent history. In a few scenes, they discuss a controversial book written about the degrading concessions some Holocaust survivors had to make to live through it — an ugly reality that adds a much-needed layer of specificity to a film that too often plays on generalities.
Despite its flaws, The Matchmaker is inherently likable; its well-cast ensemble coasts effortlessly toward some genuinely funny moments. But, bogged down by too many “Screenwriting 101” formulas, it never achieves the accompanying pathos it’s shooting for.
THE MATCHMAKER. Director: Avi Nesher; Cast: Adir Miller, Maya Dagan, Tuval Shafir, Dror Keren, Dov Navon; Rating: NR; Distributor: Menemsha;
In Hebrew with English subtitles. Opens: Friday at Living Room Theaters at FAU, Movies of Delray, Movies of Lake Worth, Cinema Paradiso, Tamarac Cinema 5 and Frank Theaters Intracoastal Mall