Back in November when the Philadelphia Jewish Film Festival screened more than 30 movies over 12 days, I was more than a little busy with the birth of my first child. Fortunately, Philadelphia Jewish Film and Media, which hosts the festival, graciously opened its lineup to online screenings, so I played catch-up. None of the three films discussed here are available to stream or have had a U.S. theatrical release yet (Fantasy Life hits theaters on March 26), but making the festival circuit is how small films try to make those leaps, so keep an eye out for these three quality films.
Mama (Polish and Hebrew with English subtitles; directed by Or Sinai)
Early on in the spare, moody Polish/Israeli film Mama, we meet Mila (played by Evgenia Dodina), a live-in housekeeper working for a wealthy family in Israel. One day she suffers a fall climbing a ladder to clean a chandelier, which puts her out of work for the foreseeable future. She thinks of her employers as sweet people “like family,” but they politely invite her to leave the house, encouraging her to go back to her home in Poland to recover and spend time with her real family before returning to Israel.
Mama forgoes exposition, and so we are faced with making assumptions about a woman like Mila—including where she actually calls home. Predictably, Poland is not how she left it 15 years ago. Her husband Antoni (Arkadiusz Jakubik) has more or less taken up with another woman, and her daughter Kasia (Katarzyna Lubik) is starting to separate herself from Mila’s ideas about her path in life. Mila has built her entire life’s rationale around earning money for her daughter to finish school. To see her daughter develop designs on her own life, ones that might involve blowing up the upwardly mobile life her mother had imagined for her, sends Mila spiraling.
Israeli director Or Sinai, who also wrote the screenplay, never establishes whether or not Mila is Jewish or has Jewish roots. Unless I missed something, the film keeps this ambiguous. If she were Jewish, one could extrapolate a story about the tenuous lack of roots for Jews in Poland since the Holocaust. She finds that her safety net is even weaker than she thought. The traditional expectations of family lie out of reach for people like Mila, who eventually find themselves forced to find it on their own terms. Mama is an interesting story about how home can be such a fragile thing for migrant workers, who may seem to be getting by but still find themselves pushed back down when climbing the ladder.
The Most Precious of Cargoes (Animated; French with English subtitles; directed by Michel Hazanavicius)
A woman and her husband, a gruff woodcutter, live in snowy woods across a beautiful landscape. The woman (voiced by Dominique Blanc) lives in angst over not being able to have a child. It feels like a fairy tale. It is a fairy tale. You wait for what kind of magical intervention will arrive. Then a sound in the distance, a low rumbling, and an unmistakable plume of gray smoke rising out of the snowy white sky. A train. They seem to know where this train is headed, that it has passed by many times before. One senses quickly that this will be a different type of fairy tale, a darker one.
Suddenly, the woman’s prayers for a child are answered. After the train passes, she hears a faint cry in the distance. A baby lies there in the snow, shivering and crying. She rushes and finds it wrapped in cloth, like Moses in the basket on the Nile.
Only the baby’s arrival is not met with unbridled joy. Her husband (voiced by Grégory Gadebois) threatens to do the unthinkable as he considers the ramifications of having what is clearly a Jewish baby in their midst. Antisemitism in and around their community is rife and extreme, with Jews never called by name but instead called “the heartless.” It’s a fitting projection for people who would so easily swallow hateful propaganda and groupthink. But the woodcutter starts to see the baby as innocent. Maybe he isn’t so heartless.
What follows is a war-torn journey, vividly told by the French filmmaker Michael Hazanavicius, who wrote and directed 2011’s Oscar-winner The Artist. Cargoes is not unlike the films of another director, Guillermo Del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth, Frankenstein), who so well finds the intersection of the dark and light of humanity. And Hazanavicius’s quiet spareness and black-and-white hues offered up by the snowy woods bring to mind the films of Ingmar Bergman. It is an animated film, but don’t let that stop you adults from seeking it out when it becomes available in the United States.
Fantasy Life (Directed by Matthew Shear)
Writer/director Matthew Shear first caught my eye as a supporting cast member in Noah Baumbach’s 2015 film Mistress America, where he features in an extended scene where everything explodes into farce. Shear’s dry yet neurotic delivery is an essential part of what makes it work. Following years of other small supporting roles, he gets to finally write, direct and lead Fantasy Life.
His debut is strong. Shear stars as a Jewish thirtysomething New Yorker named Sam who gets laid off from his job as a paralegal. Appropriately, he finds himself in his psychiatrist Fred’s office, seeking guidance for his next steps and treatment for his OCD. As a family friend, Fred (played by Judd Hirsch, who at 90 doesn’t look like he’s aged a day since his Oscar-nominated performance as another psychiatrist in 1980’s Ordinary People) can’t help himself when he sees a nice Jewish boy struggling, even if it means skirting some ethical standards. He shares that his granddaughters need a babysitter, with his son (Alessandro Nivola) on the road as a touring musician. Nanny seems to be about the last job Sam would qualify for, but here comes the movie!
Sam finds himself deep in the family dynamics of this wealthy Brooklyn family, earning the trust and care of mother Diane (Amanda Peet), a middle-aged out-of-work actress whose marriage seems to be on permanent hiatus. If you have seen enough movies, you can see where this is all going, even if it seems totally unbelievable. But a movie called Fantasy Life isn’t going to concern itself with being realistic. Anyway, connection and attraction don’t always fit those bounds. It reminded me of another recent film, Between the Temples, where the characters’ compatibility matters less than the unique things two lost souls might be able to give each other at the moment in their lives when we encounter them.
Fantasy Life is one of the funnier films I’ve seen lately, and the movie nerd in me was tickled by the strong supporting cast, which includes Andrea Martin, Jessica Harper and Bob Balaban.
