By Joel Magalnick, Editor, JTNews
DVD Reviews
Nora’s Will (2010, Mexico)
Directed by Mariana Chenillo
Menemsha Films
Fourteen times Nora tried to kill herself. On the 15th, she succeeded, but not before preparing an intricate Passover feast that would bring her family together for one last seder. That’s the premise of Nora’s Will, a film from up-and-coming Mexican filmmaker Mariana Chenillo.
While Nora’s the one with the will, and the word fits in any way you define it, (the Spanish title of the film, incidentally, is Cinco Dias sin Nora — Five Days Without Nora), the story is really about José, Nora’s stubborn ex-husband who lives in an apartment across the street, just a binocular’s view away.
José has spent the past 30 years not wanting to know what has been happening in his former wife’s life. But it’s he who discovers Nora’s body after the boxes of frozen meat Nora has ordered for her last seder have been redirected to his home and he reluctantly takes a break from his busy life — computer Solitaire waits for no man, after all — to cross the street and enter the luxury apartment that was once his.
José‘s discovery launches a comedy, such as it is, of errors that marks the path to Nora’s burial. In come the antagonistic chief rabbi and his mousy rabbinical student, who must guard the body for the four days that burial is forbidden due to the holiday and then Shabbat. Also entering the scene, however, is the “wake and go” Catholic “funeral team,” with their votives in the front hall and the cross-shaped coffin, whom José has enlisted to take the body despite the pleadings of Nora’s psychiatrist that he must wait for his son to return from vacation for the burial to take place.
The son, Ruben, has his own problems. He lives in the shadow of his powerful father-in-law, his boss and a man who has a lot of sway with the above-mentioned rabbi. He is of course upset that his father would bury his mother without waiting, but more upset that his father has made the rabbi angry. As the film rolls on, the consequences of José‘s actions become clear, and that of course makes Ruben even more upset.
Something else is troubling José, however. In the opening scene of the film, as Nora got herself ready to end it all, she inadvertently dropped a photo of herself from decades before, in the company of another man. Of course José discovers the photo and must continually distract the young shomer and his family members so he can break into Nora’s keepsake desk to find out who the man was. As he learns, the man in the photo was not as far from the family as José may have liked. It’s a discovery that launches him on a search within himself about what this troubled but important person truly meant to him.
All the while the drama surrounding the burial is going on, Nora’s longtime housekeeper has been preparing and cooking a meal for which Nora, in her own preparations for the long sleep, had left specific instructions. She had also set the table.
In the end, Nora gets what she wants, like she always did when she was alive. Including, as we learn, her husband back.
Nora’s Will screened this year at the AJC Seattle Jewish Film Festival and is now available on DVD from
www.menemshafilms.com.
A Matter of Size (2009, Israel)
Directed by Erez Tadmor and Sharon Maymon
Menemsha Films
This film closed last year’s Jewish Film Festival, and it got the top billing for good reason. It was hilarious! Herzl is overweight, he can’t commit to his girlfriend, he can’t find a decent job, and his mother (who he lives with) is sick of him. He can’t even get respect in his diet group.
But then he gets a job as a busboy at a Japanese restaurant, and all of a sudden things start looking up. Rather than lose weight, Herzl is encouraged to gain — because his new employer finally relents and allows him to train to become a sumo wrestler. From there begins the workout adventure of a lifetime, and the path to happiness as Herzl finally gains confidence in himself, with of course a few stumbles along the way. As our regular film reviewer Michael Fox wrote last year about the cast, “One of the pleasures of A Matter of Size is watching good actors who don’t fit the leading-man model and likely aren’t offered such meaty roles very often. For viewers fed a steady diet of Hollywood movies, it’s downright bracing to hang out with characters who aren’t drop-dead, blow-dry gorgeous.”
A Matter of Size is available on DVD on Dec. 6 at www.menemshafilms.com. If you preorder you’ll even get a free stress ball.