The Donald M. Ephraim Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival, now in its 24th year, unspools between tomorrow and Sunday, Jan. 26, at the Frank Theaters at Delray Marketplace (FT) and Cobb Theaters (CT) at Downtown in Palm Beach Gardens, featuring an eclectic array of feature films, documentaries and shorts on various aspects of Jewish culture.
Below are brief critical views on a handful of the movies:
DANCING AT JAFFA: Dance has such power to bring people together — at least in the movies — so maybe it can bring some understanding to a land of lingering conflict. That is the impulse of former ballroom dance champion Pierre Dulaine, who returns to his Israeli place of birth on an idealistic mission to teach Jewish and Palestinian 11-year-olds to dance together as a path to cross-cultural understanding. At their age, contact with the opposite sex is scary enough, and any male-female touching is expressly forbidden for devout Muslims.
Yet Dulaine attempts to persuade the kids to put that aside and learn how to dance with the enemy that they have been “carefully taught” to hate. Director Hilla Medalia focuses on Dulaine, his attempts to use charm to achieve success, his subsequent frustrations and his enlisting of aid from his former dance partner, Yvonne Marceau. The faces and reactions of the children speak volumes, very reminiscent of 2005’s Mad Hot Ballroom. In English, Hebrew and Arabic, with subtitles. (A-) FT, 1/25, 7:30 p.m.; CT, 1/26, 4:00 p.m.
BROADWAY MUSICALS: A JEWISH LEGACY: Just as the festival’s opening night film, When Comedy Went to School, pointed out how the humor landscape is dominated by Jewish comics, this celebration of one of the great American art forms notes how Jewish composers and lyricists have had a near-monopoly on the musical theater genre. As narrator Joel Grey (né Katz) points out, Broadway has been “a little Jewish club,” but until Fiddler on the Roof, these writers hardly ever tackled Jewish stories, preferring to put it in code, writing instead about outsiders overcoming obstacles, from Show Boat to La Cage aux Folles.
So you could take Michael Kantor’s well-researched and crafted documentary as a sociological treatise or as an excuse to view some very entertaining archival clips of Broadway performances and the subsequent movie musicals. Just sit back and enjoy hearing from such creative forces as Charles Strouse, Stephen Sondheim and Mel Brooks, and numbers from Funny Girl to Cabaret to Spamalot. What’s not to like? (A-) FT, 1/20, 11 a.m.; CT, 1/22, 1:30 p.m.
THE JEWISH CARDINAL: The title may sound like a contradiction in terms, but the story is true. If it were made up, no one would believe it, At the age of 14, Jean-Marie Lustiger embraced Catholicism when the Nazis occupied Paris, yet he also clung to his Jewish heritage. He then was drawn to the priesthood and was quickly elevated to archbishop, cardinal and confidant of Pope John Paul II.
His precarious dual religious faith then came in handy when a group of nuns establish a convent inside the grounds of the former Auschwitz death camp and he had to negotiate their exit. Laurent Lucas is pure charisma as Lustiger and director Ilan Duran Cohen makes an epic film on a seemingly small budget, recreating scenes within the Vatican with impressive authenticity. In French with subtitles. (B+) FT, 1/18, 7:30 p.m.; CT, 1/19, 7:30 p.m.
CUPCAKES: You would think that Israelis have more important things to worry about than who wins an international singing competition, but that is the tension-challenged focus of this feather light musical inspired by the Eurovision song contest. Director Eytan Fox (Yossi & Jagger) populates this feel-good flick that diabetics should probably avoid with a bunch of squeaky-clean, chipper white kids who write a cheery little ditty which gets them selected to represent Israel in the (fictional) Universong competition. But first a team of marketing pros try to make them over, erasing whatever little personality they and their song possessed.
After a handful of self-doubts, frictions and threats to drop out, off the group goes from Jerusalem to Paris for their date with destiny and potential fame. There are varied types represented — a gay nursery school teacher with a closeted boy friend, a cupcake baker recently abandoned by her husband, a former Miss Israel and a cabinet minister’s assistant who would rather sing — but they come off as too calculated by then filmmakers. This seems to be the proof that not all Israeli films are political. In English, Hebrew and French, with subtitles. (C+) FT, 1/24, 1:30 p.m.; CT, 1/26, 1:45 p.m.
STURGEON QUEENS: Yet another important Jewish obsession is food, so it was probably inevitable that someone would make a documentary about one of the great delicatessens of New York’s Lower East Side. That someone is director Julie Cohen, who lavishes nostalgic affection on the history, lore and potential future of Russ and Daughters, the Manhattan mecca of smoked fish. She documents the store’s genesis and growth up to today, as the store prepares to celebrate its 100th anniversary.
An institution like Russ deserves a few good testimonials, which Cohen collects from such luminaries as Morley Safer, Calvin Trillin and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Also included are commentaries from everyday satisfied customers, several of whom are gathered to read the film’s narration, a rather strained, self-conscious device. Started by Joe Russ, the store was passed down to his daughters — age 92 and 100 in the film — and now to the fourth generation of Russes who are pulling the operation into the 21st century with the use of the Internet and the creation of a café. All in all, a tasty film. (A) FT, 1/20, 1:30 p.m.; CT, 1/21, 11 a.m.
PARIS MANHATTAN: First-time director-writer Sophie Lellouche has come up with the best Woody Allen movie that Allen never made. Flipping the gender of her central Allen-ish character, but making her no less neurotic, she tells of an attractive, yet single pharmacist named Alice (Alice Taglioni) who so reveres the Woodman that she converses with a poster of him in her Paris apartment. He would seem to be an odd source of advice on romance, but Alice listen to him dutifully, just as Allen did from Humphrey Bogart in Play It Again, Sam.
Emboldened with his wisdom, she dives back into the dating pool, with varying success. And when patients come into her pharmacy, she often prescribes DVDs of Allen’s films as remedies. Lellouche takes us on a tour of her Paris, just as Allen often has with his New York, and she displays a distinctly Jewish comic sensibility, with a French twist. In French with subtitles, but Allen speaks English. (A) FT, 1/21, 11:00 a.m.; CT, 1/23, 2:30 p.m.
THE ZIGZAG KID: Your tolerance for whimsy will be sorely tested by this coming-of-age tale about Nono, the son of the world’s greatest police detective, on the days just before his bar mitzvah. At his father‘s urging, the boy travels across Europe to solve a mystery, to understand his own lineage and identity. Nono is accompanied on this road trip by his father’s arch-rival and notorious criminal, Felix Glick, and along the way they team up with a French Riviera nightclub singer, Lola Ciperola (Isabella Rosselini of all people), whose name is impetus enough to belt out a rendition of Whatever Lola Wants.
Do not be concerned, as it is likely, if you are ahead of the film in figuring out the true identity of these two characters. Vincent Bal directs it all with his tongue planted firmly in his cheek, which is how you should receive the film. If you have children or grandchildren, this is the one to bring them to. In English, French and Dutch, with subtitles. (B) CT, 1/26, 7 p.m.; FT, 1/26, 8 p.m.