Sandwich stories

>> Director Garry Beitel on smoked meat, the immigrant experience, Ryan Larkin and his new documentary Chez Schwartz

by MARK SLUTSKY

“We shot over 30 days, and every day was a challenge,” Garry Beitel says. “Because you’re watching people eat them and prepare them—did I have a sandwich every day that I was shooting? Just about. But this is a guy who had one smoked meat a year, at the most, before I started shooting the film.”

Beitel is talking to the Mirror at a crowded table in the back of famed delicatessen Schwartz’s, subject of his new documentary Chez Schwartz (for the record, he only has a coffee). The film chronicles a year in the life of the legendary eatery, following its proud, dedicated staff, its lifelong customers and the panhandlers outside who are just as much a part of the restaurant’s ambience as the pickles. Though offering a brief overview of Schwartz’s history, the film is very much rooted in the now—Beitel says he wanted to tell the story in the “present tense”—presenting the place not as a nostalgia piece but a thriving and vital element of Montreal culture.

“What drew me here was, as a documentary filmmaker, I’m looking for a subject that’s, on one hand, cinematic—I want it to be visually interesting,” he says, “But I also want to be able to tell stories. And I just had the sense that if you stayed here for a long period of time, there’d be stories. Because everyone I know has a Schwartz story.”

One of those is the story of the immigrant experience in Montreal; watching the film, you get the impression that the restaurant is a microcosm of the town’s various ethnic identities. “If you look at the staff,” Beitel says, “new immigrants start in the kitchen, and the older immigrants make it into the front part of the restaurant. So the main part of the restaurant is now mostly Portuguese. It used to be Greek, but now the Latin Americans are moving into the front too. And if you look around here it’s probably about 60 per cent French Québécois eating here at Schwartz’s. It’s not a Jewish restaurant anymore.”

The sense of change is palpable. It’s hard not to feel a sense of poignancy seeing the late grocer Simcha Leibovich ordering a sandwich, or watching the scene where sculptor and Schwartz’s mainstay Stanley Lewis, who died last year, chats with his former student Ryan Larkin about Larkin’s lung cancer diagnosis (Larkin succumbed to the disease on Feb. 14).

“When we started shooting, the film Ryan had just won the Oscar, and there was a feeling of, enough, I don’t want to capitalize on this and do yet another film on Ryan Larkin—it looks kind of cheap to do that,” Beitel says. “So I backed off and gave him lots of room. But he loves the camera! We were backing off but he was coming to us and being really charming, and philosophical and sweet and poignant, and then you find out that he’s developed lung cancer and that he’s part of the story.”

CHEZ SCHWARTZ OPENS
THIS FRIDAY, MARCH 2

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