Late Marriage

The notion of arranged marriage is a volatile one for some people. Most people would find it repressive, or at the very least, anti-romantic. Monsoon Wedding was a film that played fairly, so to speak, about the subject, as it actually passed no judgment on the practice -- the Israeli film, Late Marriage, however, isn't so fair, which will please most of us more sensible folk.

A young man, Zaza, is seen as a disappointment by his family because he has not married, at the age of 31. His parents, and extended family, attempt to fix him up with different young women. At the beginning of the film, they try to set him up with a young girl, who I must admit was pretty hot, but that's not the point, since they've never seen each other before, and yet the expectation is that they ought to get married. The atmosphere virtually resembles a business deal -- the father talks to the uncle of the woman about all the great things that his son has: he has all the fancy new toys, like a Sony stereo, widescreen TV, and also has a good apartment and a Ph.D. Who wouldn't marry a guy with those credentials??? The men's wheeling-and-dealing has its female counterpart in more traditional methods -- namely, love charms. Zaza's aunt gives his mother a love charm which supposedly contains the foreskin of an eight-day old child, with the expectation that, by sliding this under the potential bride's bed, she will fall in love with the man.

It soon becomes apparent that the real issue is not this particular woman, but whether or not the man will follow the traditions of the family, or go his own way. We soon find out that the man in fact has a woman on the side -- a slightly older divorcee, Judith, with child. The man and the woman have clandestine encounters during the middle of the night; the woman doesn't want her own daughter to find out about this man, and the overall behavior virtually suggests that the morality of this sort of relationship is to this movie as the morality of a clandestine adulterous affair would be in any other movie.

(Major Spoilers within) The film has the feel of a subtle comedy. Of course, the whole thing with the love charms is pretty amusing. And there is a lot of chuckles along the way. But what happens is not that we begin to like or enjoy the characters -- I, myself, began to hate most of them. This is not because of any deficiencies with the script -- this is because the movie makes it clear how far this family will go to keep the tradition alive, and it's not pretty.

Zaza isn't any better either, as it turns out. During the pivotal scene where the entire family confronts him and his illicit lover, he shows to be a person of little backbone. He barely makes a fuss, and in fact, projects a lot of self-loathing. In fact, we've noticed that the son has already noticed his parents and family staking out the place where this woman lives, and leaves the main door unlatched, knowing that sooner or later, they will come upstairs and create a scene (Surely he's not stupid enough to think that something as what follows wouldn't occur???)

The scene in which the man's family quietly barges into Judith's apartment and wreaks emotional -- and physical -- havoc is incredible. It's as if we're watching the Jewish version of the Sopranos, except without guns or messy executions. These people are utterly shameless at protecting what they see as their dignity. Both the men and (especially) the women say the most appalling things about this poor woman, even to her face, and in front of the woman's little daughter, at that. And the fact that Zaza goes on with his self-loathing schtick instead of truly taking a stand one way or the other will sorely disappoint romantics in the audience --- the only person in this entire picture that I had any sympathy for was Judith. She was the only one with pure motives -- she wanted to love, but naturally found it difficult, considering that she is now single with child, and is seeing a man who is apparently locked in certain marital expectations that will not allow for an older, divorced woman. She, and her young daughter, are the only victims in this travesty. My feelings about the other characters were merely several levels of utter contempt.

Well, I suppose in a sense, all of these people are victims of a particular system, in which marriage has nothing to do with love, but with the image and respect of families. In this insular world, women are seen as sluts and wh-res if they dare to marry whom they want, while men are seen as throwing their lives away, and throwing away the good family name, if they marry whom they want. But it's difficult to immediately think of these people as victims when you want the only good person in this movie to release a huge mass of spit toward their faces.

I might as well refer, yet again, to this movie's place in the explicit-sex-in-foriegn-film sweepstakes (alongside ...And Your Mother Too). Late Marriage's contribution is in a lengthy scene of intimacy; it's not all sex, but Zaza and Judith are naked throughout, so I suppose it can qualify as a lengthy sex scene. Actually, this is the way sex scenes ought to be -- we see much of what we want, in our puerile ways, to see, and yet it doesn't feel like mere pornography, since certain elements of this scene reveal character and plot, and these two are actually doing more than just sex. It doesn't feel like a sex scene put in to spice up the flick, although I suppose it does spice it up a bit anyway. And Judith is actually kind of sexy in that ordinary-woman kind of way, but that's just me!

Overall, this isn't a good choice for those looking for romance, or for faster-paced movies, but Late Marriage is a fine black comedy about what I would consider a rather dubious "tradition".

(Other good films from Israel include Yana's Friends, The Summer of Aviya, and Urban Feel; I mention this because these films were not on the Epinions database when I had viewed these movies.)