Film review: Subversively fun Kiss Me Kosher sets love amid a powder keg
Israeli-Palestinian tensions and intergenerational trauma make for an unlikely romantic-comedy setting
The Vancouver Jewish Film Festival presents Kiss Me Kosher from March 4 to 14
THERE’S A FAMOUS line in a Fawlty Towers episode, when John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty, faced with a group of German tourists, implores his staff, “Don’t mention the war!”
Kiss Me Kosher does not heed this advice. In fact, it makes the Holocaust the central impediment to a happy union between star-crossed lovers Shira (played by Israeli actor Moran Rosenblatt) and Maria (German actor Luise Wolfram).
Toss in a good dose of Israeli-Palestinian tensions simmering in the background, and you’ve got yourself a powder keg of a backdrop in which to set a romantic comedy. And yet, somehow, director and writer Shirel Peleg has managed to deftly weave it all together into a light, even fizzy, pleasure.
Refreshingly, about the only thing both women’s families have no qualms with is their sexuality. It’s the weight of history, not homophobia, that threatens to topple their relationship. To Shira’s surprise, her usually welcoming family isn’t exactly overjoyed that her fiancée is German, least of all her formidable grandmother, Berta (Israeli actor Rivka Michaeli). A tough-as-nails Holocaust survivor with a defiant chainsmoking habit, Berta simply won’t entertain the thought of her granddaughter marrying a German, even as she indulges in flirtations with a Palestinian paramour.
Much of the comedy comes in the form of Shira’s sharp one liners. A feisty bar owner with a long list of romantic conquests in her past (she can’t seem to turn a corner without running into yet another ex-girlfriend) she is brimming with sardonic wit. “Where I’m from, [the Holocaust] is all we talk about,” she quips to Maria, over dinner. “And if we’re not analyzing it or using it as an excuse for something we’re not supposed to be doing, we’re eating.”
Maria, a statuesque red-haired biologist doing field work in Israel, is the calm to Shira’s storm. Elegant and reserved, she is prone to hiccup attacks whenever tensions threaten to boil over—whether it’s at dinner with Shira’s boisterous family, where political arguments over Arab-Israeli relations are de rigueur, or when she’s being iced out by the stubborn Berta. Of course, no romantic comedy is complete without the requisite break up and reconciliation, and Kiss Me Kosher is no exception to that rule.
What is perhaps most subversive about the film is not that it’s unconventional, but that it is exactly the opposite. In fact, at its core, Kiss Me Kosher, is as formulaic and conventional a romantic comedy as any other. It just so happens to feature a lesbian love story, intergenerational trauma, middle-east geopolitics, and clashing cultures. It really shouldn’t work. And yet it does.
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