Victoria’s Family Secrets
Daniel Burman’s Lost Embrace
A hand-held camera scurries along behind our narrator, following him through the streets of an industrial Buenos Aires neighborhood and into a second-rate mall, setting Lost Embrace in motion. “Behind our counters, we have our stories,” says Ariel Makaroff, our drama’s protagonist, of retail workers\xe2\x80″rejecting the anonymity that often accompanies standing behind a cash register. Ariel himself is in his mother’s lingerie business, a store called “Elias Creations,” named after the absent father who completes their confused Freudian triangle. But Lost Embrace is no formulaic family drama; rather, this offering from Daniel Burman, which was Argentina’s entry into 2004 Academy Awards, uses the mall’s setting to create a quirky landscape populated by an eclectic assembly of merchants. Humorously and frankly, the film draws us into the secret lives of storekeepers\xe2\x80″and in the process, crafts an enchantingly nuanced family narrative.
Ariel skillfully navigates the world of his quirky mall, a cultural and commercial melting pot in which no relationship, filial or professional, is as it first appears. A Yiddish-speaking “schmatte” outlet, for instance, adjoins a Korean Feng Shui store, whose owners are the subject of intense speculation because no one knows whether they are spouses, siblings, or neither. Ariel’s attractive next-store-neighbor, and fling, refuses to tell him whether the man who financially backs her store married or begat her. In fact, the most accurate grasp on relationships comes from a local rabbi, who tells Ariel that grandchildren are a reward to parents for not having killed their children.
The focus of this confusing web of kinship is the enchantingly Oedipal Makaroff mother-son duo, who are haunted by the negative space of Elias Makaroff’s absence. Through snippets of mall-talk, we learn that Elias left his family to fight for Israel in the Yom Kippur War, abandoning an infant Ariel and his older brother. With the only record of interaction with his father a home video of his circumcision, Ariel’s attitude toward Elias has long become hostility. But his father’s legacy hovers in the mall; the other vendors retell a tale in which he smashes a jar of expired mayonnaise on the pub’s counter with the deference of those recounting an epic legend.
Happily, that is the only element of nostalgia to be found in Lost Embrace, which eschews sentimentality in favor of the absurd. The Jewish grandmother in this film is a Polish ex-chanteuse who, refreshingly, is more passionate about reviving her singing career than about feeding her grandchildren. Polish-Jewish jokes in this social group end with the casual observation “and then they were all killed,” rather than a nostalgic toast of Manishewitz. Ariel’s brother, Joseph, has left behind the rabbinate to sell gadgets, but secretly yearns for a life of Talmudic contemplation. Burman doesn’t forget to put the guilt in the Jewish family, though: when Ariel has the audacity to stay out all night, his mother dramatically requests that he kill her with her lekach (traditional Jewish pound cake) knife.
Lost Embrace’s greatest asset is its acting. It is a pleasure to watch characters interrupt each other with rhythmic precision. Mrs. Makaroff’s stories inevitably culminate in her stuffing a piece of home made lekach into her mouth at the crucial moment. Finely executed dialogue endows the film’s interactions with the feel of a graceful documentary, uncovering a succession of small animating details of mall life which affirm Ariel’s opening testimony over and over again. A travel agent’s fa\xc3\xa7ade belies the money exchange business he runs behind closed doors. The Kims, Ariel discovers, moved from Korea to escape a religious tribal myth barring their marriage because of ancestry. Rita asks Ariel’s “help” in the dressing room of “Elias Creations.”
The plot builds gradually to a double peak, the first of which is a race between two businesses’ deliverymen to settle a debt. On a street of Buenos Aires, the small community assembles, suddenly resembling an eastern European shtetl. This mundane climax leads into the movie’s second\xe2\x80″the return of a now one-armed Elias Makaroff\xe2\x80″which is thankfully executed with the same dispassionate humor as the first. While Lost Embrace is peppered with events\xe2\x80″Ariel’s plans to move to Poland, Elias’ homecoming, even the street race\xe2\x80″the movie’s appeal lies in its landscape of characters, its emphasis on minutiae over plot contours.
Even though the race and the father’s return present a dual culmination of the film’s events, the rest of the movie doesn’t depend on them. Rather, it focuses on the appealingly everyday, proving that overly defined cinematic peaks and valleys aren’t necessary to make a good movie, only a thoughtful assemblage of good acting\xe2\x80″along with, perhaps, a one-armed father and an extra-sharp cake knife.
Haredi and Waiting
Michael Rainin’s Waiting for Woody Allen
“In Israel, they always say that Samuel Beckett is a Jewish writer,” says Professor Enoch Brater, a Beckett scholar at the University of Michigan. “They know he’s not Jewish, but they think of him that way because of his sense of humor. Yes, it’s very typical Irish humor\xe2\x80″dancing on top of a grave\xe2\x80″but also very Jewish, in its way.” It’s no coincidence, then, that in Waiting for Woody Allen, filmmaker Michael Rainin’s fifteen-minute takeoff of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, the two main characters have been replaced by black-hatted Hasids named Yossel and Mendel, waiting for salvation to arrive in the form of Woody Allen\xe2\x80″who might or might not have told Yossel to meet him “by the lamppost” in Central Park. As in Beckett’s play, where two men carry on about everything and nothing to pass the time until Godot arrives, Yossel and Mendel talk and kvetch about therapy, cold knishes, camera lenses, and the prophet Moses’ “unusual” relationship with God. And like Beckett’s characters, they begin to wonder whether waiting around is really getting them anywhere.
According to Professor Brater, this kind of manipulation of Godot isn’t all that rare. “The play is so well-known that it’s so easy to reference it,” he says. “And waiting around for someone to come who never does is widely applicable.” But where Godot is often read as a meditation on the relationship between the characters and the guy they’re waiting for, Woody Allen is more a study of the relationship between Yossel and Mendel. As they begin to realize that their idol is never showing up, though, Rainin’s Hasids grow despondent. Within fifteen minutes, they’ve decided to leave.
Ultimately, Rainin’s film is less an adaptation of Godot than an independent project that borrows its premise. Where Beckett’s play is lengthy, with a plot that’s intentionally nonexistent, Rainin’s short doesn’t give the directionless conversation room to take on meaning. Despite moments of pathos, pretensions as a Beckett send-up, and attempts at comedy about wacky Hasidic men, Waiting for Woody Allen doesn’t really add up to much. Yossel and Mendel are still sitting on their bench as the credits roll\xe2\x80″like the movie itself, the characters never go anywhere.
