Fixed IDs? The Boston Jewish Film Festival turns 16 BY PETER KEOUGH
	The Boston Jewish Film Festival At the Museum of Fine Arts, the Coolidge Corner Theatre and the West Newton Cinema November 3-14.

When Madonna changes her name to Esther, takes up the Kabala, and makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the time has come to reconsider the nature not only of Jewishness but of identity in general. Not that the Material Girl isn’t serious about her new persona — and maybe that’s what’s so disturbing. That she can assume an identity that’s endured millennia of hardship as readily as she popped on a cone-shaped bra reduces faith to the level of fashion statement.

Meanwhile, the Boston Jewish Film Festival has turned 16, the traditional age for doubting all that’s established and asking big questions. And this year, this consistently excellent cinema event is indeed featuring films in which existential quandaries regarding identity and faith are viewed from the point of view of adolescents, or at least those who are adolescents at heart.

With mixed results, as you would expect. Adolescence is a time of impulsiveness, clumsiness, pretentiousness, and occasionally genius. Not much of this last, unfortunately, is evident in Mexican filmmaker Marcela Arteaga’s self-indulgent documentary Recuerdos/Remembrances (2003; November 10 at 5 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner Theatre). Ostensibly about the late Luis Frank, it comes off more as the director’s strained effort to be a visionary auteur like Andrei Tarkovsky or Luis Buñuel.

Frank’s life, a virtual road map of Jewish experience in the 20th century, deserves better. An American immigrant whose family fled pogroms in Lithuania to settle in New York City, he fought for the Republicans during the Spanish Civil War, aided Jewish orphans in Paris before the fall of France, served as a spy for the Americans during the Occupation, and then repatriated to Mexico to start a new life. Talk about reinventing one’s identity. Arteaga, however, loses track in the effort to establish her own identity as a stylist with arty shots of burning chairs on the seashore and a bogus, "dreamlike" structure that blurs Frank’s exemplary life into incoherence.

Less awkwardly adolescent are the festival’s films about adolescents. Take Paul Morrison’s Wondrous Oblivion (2002; tonight, November 4, at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner). At first, it seems a 1960s version of Bend It like Beckham with a Jewish boy substituting for the Indian girl and cricket for soccer. Like Beckham, Oblivion opens with its hero (Sam Smith) fantasizing about winning a championship. David’s reality, of course, is less glamorous. He’s the only son of two German Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, and his parents have labored hard to make a new life in slummy South London.

David excels at the academics his parents encourage but sucks at the game he loves. Then Dennis (Delroy Lindo), a Jamaican immigrant and cricket ace, moves in next door with his family, lifting David’s skills and broadening his mind. The neighbors are barely tolerant of Jews in their midst, so it’s no surprise that they’re even less keen on the new additions. David’s child-like mother (Emily Woof), on the other hand, overcomes her initial antipathy and takes a shine and then some to the strapping, avuncular Dennis. Subtler and more complex than Beckham, Oblivion doesn’t altogether avoid glibness and sentimentality. Fortunately, the superb performances prevail.

A couple of decades and a continent and a culture away, young Emkan (Mehdi Morady) faces similar challenges in The First Letter (2003; November 13 at 9 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts), Iranian director Abolfazl Jalili’s autobiographical coming-of-age tale. It’s the latter ’70s, on the cusp of the Islamic Revolution, and Emkan is struggling to fit his passionate artistic nature into the restrictions of his uptight small town. Attending a local religious school, he takes up drawing, music, poetry, photography, calligraphy, film, and politics, each endeavor ending with a teacher rapping his hand or his embittered father railing at him. His passion endures nonetheless, as does his love for Maassoum (Mina Molania), a Jewish girl enrolled in his school whose father runs the local cinema. It sounds like Les 400 coups, though Morady’s hero proves more resourceful than Antoine Doinel and Jalili’s crisp, episodic style is more deliberately poetic than Truffaut’s. The First Letter is one of the most accomplished and appealing films in the festival. (It’ll be back at the MFA November 28 as part of the Boston Festival of Films & Music from Iran.)

A close runner-up is Savi Gabizon’s Nina’s Tragedies (2003; November 6 at 9:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner and November 10 at 7 p.m. at the West Newton Cinema). Here 14-year-old Nadav (Aviv Elkabeth) is the troubled adolescent, his search for meaning and identity prompted by his parents’ divorce and his father’s retreat to a Hassidic community. Nadav’s angst too finds a romantic outlet: his mother’s younger sister, the tragic Nina (Ayelet Zorer). Along with the genial neighborhood peeping tom, he gazes on his beloved (and other women that catch his eye) and records his observations and fantasies in a rhapsodic diary. This makes for extensive voiceover narration, but it’s of a superior kind as Nadav’s words complement the director’s eye for detail and his spirit of whimsy, pathos, and absurdity. When Haimon, Nina’s husband, dies in a terrorist incident (the film’s sole concession to contemporary politics), Nadav moves in with her to cheer her up, and as he begins to put aside childish things, so does the filmmaker, with mixed but ultimately satisfying results.

If we could follow David, Emkan, and Nadav as they passed through adolescence and dragged their innocence, discontent, and libido through adulthood the way Truffaut followed Antoine, we might get something like Argentine director David Burman’s El abrazo partido/Lost Embrace (2004; November 14 at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, with actress Adriana Aizemberg present). In a Buenos Aires mini-mall that’s a microcosm of the Argentine melting pot, Ariel (Daniel Hendler), whose mother, Sonia (Adriana Aizemberg), runs a lingerie shop, dreams of emigrating to Europe. That means obtaining his grandma’s documents from the old country, which in turn means forcing her to confront her memories of Holocaust Poland. It also means confronting the mystery of his absent father. When Ariel was born, dad left for Israel, served in the 1973 Six Days War and never returned. Mostly, though, Ariel must deal with the everyday eccentricities of the delightful inhabitants of the mall, whom Burman captures with an affection and an irony that match Truffaut’s, though his stylistic mannerisms can seem a little imitative. Be sure to remain through the end credits for a moving musical treat.

An absent patriarch similarly scars a family in Sam Garbarski’s assured feature debut, Le tango des Rashevski/The Rashevski Tango (2003; November 11 at 7 p.m. at the West Newton). After the war, Holocaust survivors Rosa Rashevski and her husband went their separate ways. She rejected religion; he embraced it, leaving her, becoming a rabbi, and joining a Hassidic community in the desert in Israel. Rosa, meanwhile, has forbidden circumcision of the males in the family. When she dies, the various generations of the extended Rashevski family, ranging from octogenarian roué Uncle Dolfo to grandson Ric’s Palestinian girlfriend Khadija, begin questioning their notions of family and selfhood, a process that Garbarski evokes with a musical grace, warmth, and distance. Structured with the elegance of the title dance and with some of the calculation of the telephone chess games that bind Rosa’s two sons, the film ends with an epilogue that could be an homage to the final shot of William Wyler’s Wuthering Heights.

Such reflexivity is not always advisable. Two films about acting and the stage — and what more aching metaphor for the elusiveness of identity can there be? — offer mixed rewards. Steve Suissa’s Le grand rôle (2003; November 6 at 7 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner and November 13 at 7 p.m. at the Museum of Fine Arts, with director Steve Suissa and actress Bérénice Bejo present on November 13) is that of Shylock in The Merchant of Venice. A legendary American director (Peter Coyote) wants to film a Yiddish version of the play in Paris; local struggling actor Maurice wants the plum role. Somehow the fate of his beautiful wife, Perla (Bérénice Bejo), gets entangled in the reality/illusion of his performance in the film. It’s an intriguing idea but ultimately oversimplified into conventionality.

Another good idea that goes awry is Paper Snow (2003; November 7 at 7 p.m. and November 9 at 1 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, with the directors present on November 7), Lina and Slava Chaplin’s follow-up to their hit from the 2002 festival, Trumpet in the Wadi. This period bio-pic relates the torrid affair in the bohemian demi-monde of 1933 Tel Aviv between fortysomething Hanna Rovina (Jenya Dodina), legendary lead actress of the Habema Theatre Company, and Alexander Penn (Tzak Berkman), twentysomething lead actor in his own booze-fueled fantasy of being a romantic poet. ("Where is my Byron?" he growls as he packs to leave after another altercation with long-suffering Hanna.) The acting, especially by Dodina, is generally terrific (Berkman might too convincingly convey the callow poseur), and the sex scenes show imagination, tenderness, and heat. But like the fake precipitation of the title, the film’s re-creation of the past requires a lot of willing suspension of disbelief. I kept being distracted by the modern electric outlets and screwtop bottles. The filmmakers’ jarring combination of Dogme 95–like handheld cinematography and sepia-tinted images didn’t help.

A different kind of artifice initiates Dov Gil-Har’s sobering documentary Behind Enemy Lines (2004; November 11 at 6:30 p.m. at the Coolidge Corner, with film subjects Adnan Joulani and Benny Herness present). In 1999, the Japanese government invited 10 Israelis and Palestinians to communicate and bond in a neutral environment. In these artificial surroundings, reconciliation bloomed. In the real world, though, the Intifada began and thousands died.

In 2003, Gil-Har brought together two of the participants in the 1999 experiment: Adnan Joulani, a Palestinian journalist, and Benny Herness, an Israeli policeman. He invited them to spend four days together touring the Intifada, each visiting sites chosen by the other. The result is not unlike the peace process: an airing of grievances, reminders of atrocities and horrors endured by both sides, and no budging over key issues. Still, the two remain friends, sharing drinks at sunset on a Tel Aviv beach. Herness concludes by hoping that the war will end before his son turns 18. Maybe by the time this festival turns 18, that dream will have come true.