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When the Gold Coast Film Festival was launched last year on Long Island, my long-ago stomping grounds, I was as much amused as pleased. Certainly the metropolitan area needs more film festivals like I need . . . more film festivals. However, on the strength of their second year schedule, they probably are filling a real need on the Island. Certainly two the Jewish-themed films on the program are worthy of much wider audiences than they have had so far. When it played New Directors/New Films earlier this year, I wrote of The Rabbi's Cat:
The Rabbi’s Cat is Joann Sfar’s second directorial
effort (this time in collaboration with Antoine Delesvaux) and it’s a definite
upgrade from his Serge Gainsbourg biopic, if only because the energy never
flags and the eponymous hero has none of Gainsbourg’s questionable behaviors.
The cat, who has no name, is a creature of pure appetite, given to eating fish
and birds without hesitation. (Come to think of it, he’s more like Gainsbourg
than I thought, but he doesn’t do drugs or booze.) After apparently eating the
rabbi’s parrot, he gains the ability to speak and almost immediately adds two
new tricks to his repertoire, Talmudic disputation and lying.
Adapting his own books for the film, Sfar has
concocted an entertainingly elaborate story that combines such classic elements
of children’s adventure as a quest for a lost utopian city, a hunt for treasure
and a close-knit band of friends to share it all with. Sfar and Delesvaux also
have an eye on the adults in their audience and the film is as rich in its
supply of inside jokes as the classic Warner Brothers cartoons of the ‘40s and
‘50s, ranging from a playfully snarky homage to Tintin to a rather pointed dig
at contemporary Russian monarchists. The underlying message of the film is one of tolerance
for diversity and for feline desires for fish, both of them admirable themes
energetically enacted.
Restoration, also in the festival, is even better, one of the best films I've seen in 2012. Here's what I said back in January:
Restoration, an Israeli film by Joseph Madmony,
opens with a pair of hands removing a
wristwatch and putting it inside a old tin. We then see a series of shots of
those same hands working old wood with a combination of fervor and delicacy
that one can only find in a dedicated master craftsman. Fidelman (Sasson Gabai,
head of the Egyptian police band in The
Band’s Visit) is just such a craftsman, although his antique furniture
business is on the edge of bankruptcy. When his partner dies of a heart attack,
Fidelman is forced to rely on his upwardly mobile son Noah (Nevo Kimchi), a lawyer
with connections and plans and a very pregnant wife (Sarah Adler) Or would he better off trusting the enigmatic
younger man, Anton (Henry David), who has turned up looking for work?
Although the plot line about a stranger who inserts
himself into an unstable family situation is an old chestnut, Madmony manages
to work an interesting series of variations on the story. From that opening
shot of a man who puts time aside (literally) in the pursuit of a vocation that
is more like a calling through the entire credit sequence of Fidelman’s hands
at work, ending with a close-up of Gabai peering at his own reflection in a
glistening table top – the first time we see his face, albeit in a fragmented form – you are immediately
aware that this master craftsman is being depicted by a filmmaker who is his
equal. The progression is also an inspired metaphor for a man who has stepped
out of time in order to reverse its effects, but who is, at best, only a
partially integrated human being whose only identity comes from his work.
Madmony eschews the easy, melodramatic choices. Like
Fidelman, a man who represses his feelings in front of others but is burning
inside, Madmony works magic through the manipulation of the physical
environment, the shop’s endless, choking clutter, the dust that seems to hang
in the air everywhere, the film’s muted palette of cool blues and grays. Restoration is a muted but finally powerful film about inter-generational
conflict and loyalty, one of the best films to play the [New York Jewish Film] festival in several
years.
The Gold Coast Film Festival opens in Great Neck and other nearby locales on October 22. For more information and to purchase tickets, go to their website.
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