In Nathan Silver’s divinely chaotic grotesque “Between the Temples,” Jason Schwartzman plays a grieving singer who can no longer sing after the death of his wife but finds an odd connection with a much older widow who is looking for her bat mitzvah.
Yes, the same old story. But even that brief synopsis doesn’t really hint at the strangeness — or joy — of “Between the Temples.” The grammar of the film — 16mm, improvised, shot purposefully irregularly by Sean Price Williams — is as bizarre as its story. In this charmingly anarchic comedy, you can almost feel that the characters and the filmmakers, together, are resisting the system and going against tradition.
The experience is as tumultuous and funny as it is sweet and profound. That’s especially because of Schwartzman and Kane, who, as a couple with some echoes of Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon in “Harold and Maude,” make the best cantor-elderly bat mitzvah student pair you’ve ever seen, or, more simply put, the most memorable on-screen couple of the year.
This is Silver’s ninth feature film and possibly his best. “Between the Temples,” playful, loose and firmly set against any moment being too polished or rehearsed, is always very close to falling apart. Or maybe it always does, but it has the guts or stupidity to keep going. With disaster ever-present, “Between the Temples” builds toward a messy, lovely magic of its own.
Ben Gottlieb works at a synagogue in upstate New York, but after losing his wife in a freak accident, he has lost his singing voice and, perhaps, his faith. Ben has moved back in with his mother, Mira, and his meddling wife, Judith. In the film’s opening moments, they introduce Ben to a young woman, a doctor. He doesn’t understand that it’s a date; he assumes she’s a therapist. When he learns she’s a plastic surgeon, he asks his mother: “Do you think I need to get work done?”
But the work Ben needs goes deeper than that. “My name is in the past, too,” he sighs. After sitting listlessly in temple with Rabbi Bruce, he walks out and lies in traffic. While nursing the grief caused by a landslide at a bar, he gets into a fight. After Ben finds the watch, the woman who comes to pick him up after he finishes a karaoke performance is Carla. She helps him get through a drunken night before they learn she was his music teacher in elementary school. “Little Benny!” she yells when she remembers.
Carla soon arrives at the synagogue and tells Ben she wants a bar mitzvah. He doesn’t agree until she insists, but they soon find they fluctuate on some of the same wavelengths of grief and awkwardness. Whether she’s of the appropriate age for the coming of age ceremony is one question, but it’s also not entirely clear whether Carla is even Jewish. While the Torah plays a role in furthering the friendship, their connection — whether it’s love or not, it’s hard to say — is only partly about Judaism. They share stories of their dead spouses over burgers, which Ben learns while chewing are not kosher. Silver films the scene in close-ups of their mouths. What seems clear in Silver and C. Mason Wells’ screenplay is that the two are finding their way out of a difficult chapter of life together and entering another chapter of their own making.
Throughout, there are some surreal twists and turns, extremely awkward moments and humorous high points. One scene, in which Carla’s skeptical son and his family are at a steak house, is adorned with a ridiculously large menu. Silver has a clear affinity for filmmakers like Rainer Werner Fassbinder and John Cassavetes, but scenes like that reminded me of Elaine May.
There’s a wonderful feeling in “Between the Temples” that anything could happen at any moment. This is especially true in another dinner scene, a sensationally awkward one that brings all the characters together, including the more age-appropriate Gaby, the rabbi’s daughter.
Yet in a film full of strange sounds and muffled voices, nothing sounds better than the conversation between Kane and Schwartzman. The unique timbre of their voices turns “Between the Temples,” a film about finding your own faith, into something beautiful. “Music is the sound you make,” Carla says.
The film “Between the Temples”, released by Sony Pictures Classics, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association because of language and some sexual references. Duration: 111 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.
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