The most anxious Jewish comedy since the Coen brothers visited Jobian trauma on Michael Stuhlbarg in A Serious Man stars Carol Kane as an adult bat-mitzvah student. This alone would justify the admission price, but there’s more. Jason Schwartzman plays Ben Gottlieb, a depressed 40-year-old who’s still struggling with suicidal thoughts a year after the death of his wife.
A cantor at his local temple, Ben is too grief-stricken to sing or chant. Neither his comically overbearing mothers – Caroline Aaron and Dolly de Leon, in a casting coup de grace – nor the romantic attentions of the kink-loving rabbi’s daughter (Madeline Weinstein) can shake him from his stupor. One day he runs into Carla Kessler (Kane), his elementary-school music teacher. She needs religious instruction and he needs a sense of purpose. She’s keen to study yet shaky on kosher foods and unwilling to give up cheeseburgers. Their strange relationship raises eyebrows, not least from Carla’s baffled adult son.
Nathan Silver, a prolific indie film-maker, has struck gold with this quasi-improvised comedy. There are classic zingers: Jews “don’t have heaven or hell”, Ben observes. “We just have upstate New York.” There are fantastically awkward family get-togethers. Schwartzman reconfigures the stony-faced widowed sorrow of Asteroid City into giddy gallows humour. Kane, the veteran star of Hester Street and Scrooged, brings an electrifying restlessness to the screen. Their two-step is impeccable as they waltz through an arrestingly unpredictable film.
It’s not quite the May-December romance of Harold and Maude. Between the Temples is less orthodox than the Hal Ashby standard. Even cherished voicemails from Ben’s late wife take us to surprising places. The cinematographer Sean Price Williams, in characteristically exhilarating form, keeps pace with the offbeat shenanigans.
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Between the Temples is in cinemas from Friday August 23rd
