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Jews in love >> Obsession meets possession in The Dybbuk
by JONATHAN GOLDSTEIN
The Dybbuk takes its title from the Hebrew word for a dead spirit that enters a living person. It's based on Shloime Anski's Yiddish stage play of the 1920s, which also inspired The Exorcist. Somer borrows elements from Friedkin's horror classic, like subliminal flash-cuts and a demon that sounds like Gene Simmons in Kiss Meets the Phantom. But for all its spooky undertones, the film is largely the tale of two star-crossed lovers who want to be together. The romance begins the moment Hanan (Yehezkel Lazarov) makes eye contact with Lea (Ayelet Z'Urer) in the Jewish Orthodox quarter of Jerusalem. He's a spiritually adrift orphan on a stopover to India and she's a religious rich girl bound by a repressive culture. Unbeknownst to Hanan and Lea, when they were born, their fathers vowed to God that their children would one day wed. After Hanan's parents die, Hanan moves away and Lea's father forgets his promise, instead wanting his daughter to marry the Great Rabbi's son. Now returning as a young man, Hanan wants to lay claim to a love that was "written in Heaven" and save Lea from a marriage to a man with the sex appeal of a Hassidic Jim Nabors. Hanan trades in his sideburns for pais and sets out to become a veritable torah scholar in search of a way to unite himself with Lea. Along the way, he develops the ability to see divine visions. He takes up with a Yoda-like Rabbi who instructs him to "fight with the head, not with the heart." Eventually, unable to be with Lea in life, Hanan's ghost inhabits her body after his death, and the film climaxes in a full-out horror movie possession sequence. Somer's film is schmaltzy but it's also playful. We get Hanan studying the holy books looking like a Rembrandt and we get Hanan fleeing the Sabbath dinner table as Roger Waters sings "Knocking on Heaven's Door." We get computer animation sequences of transmigrating souls taking the form of owls that make me think this CGI stuff might be to this decade what velvet painting was to the '70s. But for all of it, The Dybbuk is undeniably charming and genuinely romantic. It's more likable and sexy than most recent Hollywood romances. And it's also the first time I've ever seen a movie sex scene that involves the male lead stripping down to his tsitsis.
Opens Friday, August 20 at the Cinéma du Parc. See repertory listings for showtimes |
Love isn't easy in The Dybbuk of the Holy Apple Field. Combining gothic romance and Jewish folk tale, Israeli director Yossi Somer presents love as creepy, nonsensical and bordering on the Satanic. But it also allows humans to transcend the repressive world of rules.