Feats of atonement The Boston Jewish Film Festival is in good humor BY PETER KEOUGH
	The 17th Annual Boston Jewish Film Festival Boston Common + Museum of Fine Arts + Coolidge Corner + West Newton + Arlington Capitol + suburbs | November 2-13.

Reflecting the current state of the world and 6000 years of tormented history, the offerings of the Boston Jewish Film Festival sometimes get a little grim. This year, they’re taking a gentler approach. Humor, a mainstay of Jewish culture and survival, dominates. Sentiment, too, though not so much as to make you gag. In general, this year’s selections take to heart many of the virtues espoused by Judaism and other faiths: compassion, tolerance, reconciliation, atonement.

Not to mention chuckles. For the most part these films, even as they confront tough issues, spare the hair shirt and the self-flagellation and go for the knowing smile and the belly laugh. That’s the case with Danny Verete’s Metallic Blues (2004; November 5 at 9:15 pm at the Coolidge Corner + November 7 at 7 pm at the West Newton), though at times the hardships of its lumpen heroes rival those in the Book of Job. "This Arab is a Godsend!", Shmuel tells Sisso, co-owner of their Tel Aviv used-car lot, when the stranger sells them a pristine, metallic blue limo for a song. A German collectible auto dealership lists it as being worth 50,000 Euros, so the pair take the car to Hamburg, where their ruefully funny tale of woe begins. As used-car salesmen themselves, they should have known better, and compounding matters is Shmuel’s repressed fear and hatred of Germany (his family were wiped out in the Holocaust), which manifests itself in untimely hallucinations. That device is one of Verete’s less successful, though it does lead to a moving dénouement. A more potent metaphor is the car itself; as disappointment and vicissitude gradually dent and demolish it, it becomes every dream that ever kept us from our true desire.

Verete broaches the nightmare of the Holocaust and still gets a laugh and credible redemption. In Lorraine Levy’s tough and charming La première fois que j’ai eu 20 ans|The First Time I Turned 20 (2004; November 5 at 7 pm at the Coolidge Corner + November 10 at 7 pm at the West Newton), misogyny joins anti-Semitism among the evils that good humor must overcome. In a shakily re-created 1960s provincial France, overweight 16-year-old Hannah (Marilou Berry in a variation on her role in Agnès Jaoui’s Comme une image|Look at Me) whines to her mother that she’s tired of being ugly. A bad start, but once Hannah starts playing licks on her double bass, it’s impossible not to warm to her. The members of her traditionally all-male school jazz band take their time doing so, though, and among the uglier incidents is a swastika inscribed on her music sheet. But Hannah cracks wise and bears up and wins the day, largely because of Berry’s robust performance.

Dani Levy’s broad and complex comedy Alles auf Zucker!|Go For Zucker! (2004; November 13 @ 2:15 pm at the MFA) also takes on multiple issues, including the divide between secular and orthodox, freedom and respectability, East and West. Don’t be put off by the crude gay joke at the beginning, or by your initial impression that the title hero is a pig. Former East Berlin TV star Jacky Zucker is a rogue and a survivor who saw his fortunes fall along with the Wall. He’s since tried to make ends meet with an "East German Nostalgia" bar (in fact a glorified bordello) and by being a pool hustler. It’s not enough; he has to come up with a fortune by Monday or go to jail. But fortune smiles on him, twice: there’s a pool tournament with a big purse in town, and when his mother dies, he can nail down his inheritance by sitting shivah with his hated straitlaced brother. The catch, of course, is that he has to do both at the same time. Can Levy get a movie off the ground with such an overloaded premise and be convincing and funny and even draw a tear or two? For answers, I recommend you go for Zucker.

Sometimes comedy is not enough. Especially when it’s not funny. Robert Margolis’s mock-documentary The Definition of Insanity (2004; November 8 @ 9:45 pm at the Coolidge Corner, with Margolis and producer Frank Matter present and singer Amy Fairchild performing beforehand) does spark a smile or two; the problem is that its mock gets in the way of its documentary, and vice versa. A film crew is supposed to be following aspiring aging actor Robert Margolis as he tries to get a gig. There are auditions here and there, plus the usual humiliating part-time jobs to help support his wife and son. Everything falls through with predictable irony, though the filmmakers mess things up a bit with chronology. Margolis pulls a cunning twist near the end, but Insanity is just too coy about what is real and what is invented.

Not so Marc Levin’s The Protocols of Zion (2005; November 6 @ 4:30 pm at the Coolidge Corner, with Levin present), which resists ambiguity and irony even though its subject calls out for it. Bewildered to learn that certain segments of the population not only believe that the Jews were responsible for September 11 but also accept the authenticity of the title forgery, the long-discredited fake handbook of Jewish world domination that fired the rise of Nazism, Levin grabs his father and tries to get to the bottom of it. The result is kind of like a Michael Moore film if Moore were a nice guy and his dad tagged along while he was making it. Levin and his father track down the origins of the title document and its history, and in the process they confront some of the most virulent anti-Semitic organizations and individuals around. You have to admire Levin’s guts, and his findings are often eye opening, but for once Moore’s bullying and sarcasm might have been appropriate as Levin’s genial, liberal rationality gets lost in the cesspool of hate and irrationality he uncovers.

The presence of an on-screen narrator shrinks to a mere metaphor in Russian director Michale Boganim’s poetic and oblique Odessa, Odessa (2005; November 6 @ 11 am at the MFA). He’s a dapper-jacketed hobo with a suitcase who escorts the camera from Odessa (now Odesa, in Ukraine) to Brighton Beach to Israel in search of the past, the mystique, and the identity of the title city. Evocative and poignant, if overlong and diffuse, the film aspires to be a tone poem along the lines of Sokurov and Tarkovsky.

More down to earth is Israeli filmmaker Ido Haar with his Melting Siberia (2004; November 9 @ 5:45 pm at the Coolidge Corner). Haar’s grandfather, a Soviet officer during World War II, had abandoned his grandmother and his mother, then an infant, for another woman in Riga in 1946. Haar persuades his mother to try to track her wayward father down and, via the Internet, she locates the wayward patriarch in the frozen city of Novosibirsk.

Why did they decide to look for the old man after all this time? I suspect because Haar thought it would make a good movie, and indeed it does, a raw catalogue of every family emotion from betrayal to reproach to the purging release of apologies and forgiveness. Although the face-to-face meeting near the end is powerful stuff, I was more moved by the first words spoken between daughter and father on the telephone. A distance of thousands of miles and 57 years closed in a few fumbling phrases, all recorded by Haar’s unblinking, unmediated camera. It’s a testament to the power of movies in achieving not just the illusion but also the reality of reconciliation and atonement.