LATE MARRIAGE
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 2002 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): * 1/2
Last year must have been one of the weakest in years for the Israeli cinema since writer/director Dover Koshashvili's grating and tedious LATE MARRIAGE (HATUNA MEUHERET) was Israel's official entry for this year's Academy Awards. A misogynist drama with few genuine moments, it is alternately talky, without much to say, and painfully, slowly silent. Although it is described in the press notes as "a sexy and biting comedy of manners," it is never the least bit funny or erotic, even if there's lots of nudity and graphically real sex.
The story concerns Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi), a man who has never grown up, and his oppressive parents who are busy finding him a suitable bride. The parents are Georgian émigrés in Tel Aviv, who have a strong sense of how things should be done. Among their strict rules are that a husband should be older than his wife, with eight years being about the proper difference. Divorcées are lepers, who aren't suitable marriage material.
When Zaza, ever the wimp, dares to fall in love with Judith (Ronit Elkabetz), a 34-year-old divorcée, his parents are aghast, dangerously aghast. After all, their boy is just thirty-one, and, as his mother lectures him sternly, "A respectable woman doesn't take a younger man." (We get other such homilies. Typical of these comes from one of Zaza's uncles, who says, "Women have ruined whole empires."
LATE MARRIAGE is the type of pretentious picture that leaves you struggling to find something good to say about it. Although the ending is extremely awkward and annoying, at least it isn't a cop out.
LATE MARRIAGE runs a long 1:40. The film is in Georgian and Hebrew with English subtitles. It is not rated but might be NC-17 for graphic sex and full frontal male and female nudity and would be acceptable for high school seniors and older.
The film opens nationwide in the United States on Friday, June 14, 2002. In the Silicon Valley, it will be showing at the Camera Cinemas.
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