San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2015

[Chris Knipp]

San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 35 --- 23 July-9 August 2015

General Forum notice and discussion thread

"But if Jews invented Hollywood (and yes, we did)," says a web page "Best Jewish Film Festivals," "then why do we need Jewish film festivals at all, let alone 80 of them, scattered across the 50 states like so many kosher delis?" They answer, because Hollywood is about being white and Christian, and never really properly represents Jews and Jewishness, which of course is true.

San Francesco's is said to be the "world's first and largest Jewish film festival" and is organized by the Jewish Film Institute. The Best Jewish Film Festivals page calls the SFJFF "the first and foremost," though it calls the New York fest "the classiest." "You can’t get classier than Lincoln Center, and you can’t get a richer variety of educated fans than those among its regular audiences." I might add that this Walter Reade Theater audience is getting pretty old, a problem Lincoln Center faces. The "Best" page calls and the Miami one the "best winter escape." You might consider San Francisco's the "best summer escape," since it might allow you to be cool in July and early August when Miami and New York are becoming steamy.

I will be covering a few more of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival films this year than last and plan on reviewing the titles listed below. The offerings as usual are impressive. See the SFJFF website here.

​As I Am: The Life and Times of DJ AM (Kevin Kerslake). A pop music, media, and addiction documentary of the short life of DJ Adam Goldstein, who became famous and influential and died young of drugs.

Dealing With the Devil (Stéphane Bentura). An investigation of Hildebrand Gurlitt, the Jewish Dresden art dealer commissioned by Joseph Goebbels to sell off "degenerate art" prized out of the hands of Jewish collectors.

Finsterworld (Frauke Finsterwalder 2013) A dark satire and anthology film of interconnected people in different places, commenting on the present state of Germany; first feature by a documentary filmmaker.

The Law/La loi: le combat d'une femme pour toutes les femmes (Christian Faure). This French film has Emmanuelle Devos playing Simone Veil, the French health minister in the mid-Seventies largely responsible for the legalization of abortion in France in 1975. This narrative feature seeks to give legal and political maneuvering the edge of a film noir.

Mind/Game: The Unquiet Journey of Chamique Holdsclaw (Rick Goldsmith) A documentary about the black female NBA star who developed mental problems and later became an advocate for more understanding and acceptance of such issues. Narrated by Glenn Close.

​​Mr. Kaplan (Álvaro Brechner). Genial aging drama and buddy picture of 76-year-old Polish refugee in Uruguay who launches a Quixotic scheme to capture an imagined local Nazi and turn him over to Israel for trial like Eichmann.

​​​​The Muses of Isaac Bashevis Singer (Shaul Betser, Asaf Galay). Maybe "mistresses" is more like it. This documentary talks about this storyteller who became a famous "American" author writing in Yiddish. A ladies man, he tended to carry his relations with his numerous female translators beyond the linguistic.

​​​My Shortest Love Affair/Ma plus courte histoire d'amour (Karin Albou) Centerpiece film, a narrative feature about nine months in the lives of two French forty-somethings who are a couple reuniting after twenty years apart and try to make it work this time.

​​Projections of America (Peter Miller) A short documentary about a series of short films to promote America abroad made as part of the war effort by Robert Riskin and reflecting a Jewish leftish outlook. Riskin is chiefly known for his 1937 Best Screenplay Oscar for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Narrated by John Lithgow.

Villa Touma (Suha Arraf) This Palestine-based drama depicts three unmarried Christian Arab sisters living in a West Bank estate and clinging to past glory. Their fantasy is interrupted by the arrival of an orphaned niece, Badia, whom they take in. Badia disrupts things when she falls in love with a good looking Muslim singer.

Women in Sink (Iris Zaki) The filmmaker, an Israeli woman, takes a job as a "shampoo girl" in the Christian Arab section of Haifa, Wadi Nisnas, her position gaining her access to many customers' stories of personal experiences.

Also, already reviewed as part of the SFIFF 2015: Very Semi-Serious (Leah Wolchok), doc about the New Yorker magazine cartoonists and their current editor, Bob Mankoff.

[Chris Knipp]

KEVIN KERSLAKE: AS I AM: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DJ AM (2014)



Rushed portrait of a short, frenetic and remarkable life

A pop music, media, and addiction documentary of the short life of DJ Adam Goldstein, who became famous and influential and died young of drugs.

A blogger and self-declared big fan of DJ AM who saw this film at the Hot Docs festival expressed disappointment at its superficiality. He writes "it feels like director Kevin Kerslake wasn’t able to get access [to] enough people who knew him before the film was completed," and wisely concludes "If you, or any member of your family has [ever] struggled with addiction you might benefit from seeing the documentary, but [for] those looking for something about DJ culture, there is not much here." Kerslake uses his music video experience to produce one long speed-freak buzz of a film that is a mix of lots of things about Adam Michael Goldstein, working title DJ AM. As we who know nothing about the turntable scene, or even what DJ's do -- and after this movie I still don't -- I did learn that this man was the leader in the field, a monster of dedication and accomplishment, who took it to a new level of fame, respect, and high pay. He got a million-dollar contract at Vegas. When he began at twenty or so, he and his colleagues were working for a few dollars a night and some beers.

Many talking heads, mostly white DJ colleagues (introduced with giant print identifications of their names, so big they're more art work than information) who say how much they loved and respected Adam and how worried they were for him when he was one of two who survived, with severe burns, the crash of a private plane in which the other four all died -- and he insisted on working harder than ever at his high-profile career, that included not only cross-country gigs it terrified him to have to fly to, but the MTV addiction-recovery program "Gone Too Far," which made him a high-profile recovering addict (11 years clean) just when painkillers for his injuries were making his own sobriety very, very precarious.

Probably, like Philip Seymour Hoffman, who suffered a similar fate after a longer clean and sober period, Goldstein had begun practicing his addiction again for some time in secret before the fatal overdose in his New York apartment at 36. The addiction story, arguably the film's stronger element, is valuably augmented by a number of recordings of what appear to be Goldstein's actual shares at various Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, which show how deeply he "got" what addiction and recovery are all about and how committed and grateful to the program he was. Almost self-destructively dedicated to the service of other addicts in recovery, he was as passionate a recovering person as he was in all he did, using drugs, DJing, collecting colorful sneakers. (The Widipedia bio, which provides information missing here, says, "Goldstein was an avid sneakerhead, owning over 600 pairs" by 2006.) The film does give the outlines of his life, including his overweight problems, his addiction to alcohol, prescription drugs, and crack cocaine, and his rough experience with rehab at 16. Mr. Goldstein, also an addict who was gay and died of AIDS when AM was young, was not his real father, a fact the boy learned from his mother (to her later regret) early on, a blow to his self-esteem. His mother took him to live in Los Angeles after an early life in Philadelphia.

We get some feel for his looks and his personality, since he was often filmed. He was a pretty but overweight boy, a pretty but overweight man, but then after gastric surgery after getting clean and sober became a thin, sexy and handsome man. After the plane crash we see him start to fill out again and lose his sharpness. A sense of duty to other DJ's whose status he had raised, and doubtless addiction to the work, using it as the only escape from drugs, leads him in his last year to push himself when he should have been regrouping. Needless to say, the hectic club scene where the turntable art is practiced is a dissipated drug-addled one in itself.

But as the Hot Docs online reviewer points out, and due to the ADD flicker of the unrelentingly high-speed editing, we don't get to go into any depth about Goldstein's personal life. His mother is one of the many talking heads, and provides her viewpoint, but her well-considered remarks don't reveal much. The best parts of the film are its scattered excerpts of Goldstein speaking, is a fragmentary but warm portrait of a man passionate about his art and for all his inner demons taking massive pleasure in his work, who cared more about recognition from black DJ's he admired (and working with them) than the endless performances at parties of celebs like Tom Cruise, Leo DiCaprio, or Madonna. It is clear that his prowess was widely recognized and he is respected and missed by many. He appeared as himself in "Entourage" and Iron Man 2, and the latter was dedicated to him after his death.

Kerslake has done many award winning and cutting edge music videos as well as films on human/animal rights and social justice and adverts for big-name brands. Not so much experience, it seems, in documentary (though he has done one on the making of a Bob Marley remix album). This is a fascinating, complex story. Maybe it is true as Dennis Harvey says in his Hot Docs review of As I AM for Variety that it's "an entertaining look at a talented turntablist who (for better or worse) pioneered his profession’s attainment of rock-star status in terms of glamour," etc. But for many the the jittery, relentless style of this film would keep it from being "entertaining." Kerslake did not consider that his jazzy, hyper kinetic editing may not suitable to an extended biographical film that considers many phases in a complex life. After a while the sameness of the film's look and pace numbs us. Every film, even the most suspenseful and high-speed, grows stronger and more dramatic only by taking occasional breaks, pausing for a breath.

When he recites what he says is the only rap he ever composed, it's the only reference in the whole film to Goldstein's being Jewish -- 1% of the film. Thus this is one of those occasions when the Jewish Film Festival almost seems to be appropriating something that more rightfully belongs to everyone.

As I AM: The Life and Times of DJ AM, 97 mins., debuted at Tribeca and also Hot Docs. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

[Chris Knipp]

STÉPHANE BENTURA: DEALING WITH THE DEVIL/LES MARCHANDS D'HITLER (2015)


FRENCH HIDING ART FROM NAZIS, ACTUAL SCENE RESTAGED IN MONUMENTS MEN

Business is business

This conventional if well-made French TV documentary goes over in specific detail, focused on one individual, a story already familiar in general outline: the looting of European art in Wold War II and the pillaging of art treasures in Jewish hands. It seems they will never all be tracked down and returned to their rightful owners or their descendants. Two poorly reviewed recent movies dealt with this: George Clooney's The Monuments Men, about the American art experts team assigned to recover art stolen by the Nazis, and Simon (My Week with Marilyn) Curtis' Woman in Gold, about a family member seeking to reclaim a single stolen Klimt portrait. This documentary mentions the Monuments Men and dwells on their heroic French ally, Rose Valland.

But the spotlight here is on a figure who became known in March 2012 when the reclusive Cornelius Gurlitt was found (through an ID check on a Swiss train) to be hiding out in a small Munich flat with an astonishing €1 billion cache of 1,500 works of famous modern artists like Dix, Nolde, Beckmann, Kirchner, Klee, Kokoshka, Marc, Chagall, Picasso, and Matisse, as well as the likes of Dürer, Renoir, Rodin, Courbet and Canaletto, all of dubious wartime provenance, presumably looted by the Nazis. It had been assembled by the man's German art dealer father, Hildebrand Gurlitt. More can be learned of Cornelius from an his obituary; he died on 6 May 2014. Most of the film traces Gurlitt père's activities during and after World War II.

He had been perhaps the chief art dealer for the Nazis. Paradoxically, Gurlitt had a Jewish grandmother; and had been dismissed from several museums due to his taste for modern art. But that was what later made him useful. At one time he was charged with selling "degenerate," i.e., modern, art looted from Jewish collections or bought for a song from German museums to make money for the Third Reich and buying "Aryan" art for Nazi officials and for Hitler's planned grand Führermuseum in Linz. Perhaps his deviousness led to the hermit-like behavior of his son, who survived for decades, wholly outside the system, by occasionally selling a small treasure; he even brought one in a small suitcase he took on his last trip to the hospital.

The documentary fills us in on general background, particularly Joseph Goebbels' efforts to destroy "degenerate" art representing "Jewish intellectualism," a plan then modified to to sell modern art for the profit of the Third Reich and to acquire acceptable or "Aryan" art. What was acceptable included sculpture of ancient Greece, classic landscapes, works of the Middle Ages or representing German roots -- pretty much anything valuable that wasn't modern. We learn something about the various ways Jewish property was stolen by the Nazis. There were other dealers besides Gurlitt, four main ones are named. Those who were "buying" work from museums kept some, always, for themselves.

But the main focus begins after the 1940 Nazi invasion of France. Gulitt moved right in. Art dealers went on dealing: business is business, even, apparently, when it becomes shady or morally reprehensible. Lots of French dealers were involved too. A few were punished after the war as a token gesture; the rest papered over the ugly spots and moved on. The big French auction house, Drouot, continued to be open throughout the war. You can imagine what it was dealing in during the Forties, and how much this profitable business led to covering of tracks by French auction houses and art dealers when the war was over.

While the war was on, Gulitt made a huge fortune selling to German museums art bought cheaply at auction in France. During all this, we're told, he prudently stayed in the background, acting through middle men.

The Nazis sought to rape and pillage Europe and Jewish collections and show off their spoils. Nearly all the big Nazi officials competed to see who could assemble the biggest personal art collection. But France as a nation protected its treasures. As The Monuments Men shows and is repeated here the great French museums, knowing what was coming, moved all their treasures into hiding in provincial chateaux, including the Mona Lisa and other iconic works. When Hitler came to Paris, he was disappointed. Nonetheless there were all the treasures stolen from Jewish collections. The biggest Nazi seizure of art in France was the Scholoss family's holdings of Flemish and Dutch masters, over 300. Erhard Göpel, another German art dealer heavily involved in the French art transfer, took most of the Schloss collection to Germany. We see his wife, who was interviewed, partly in French (she was younger), shaking here head at how awful it all was and yet still claiming today, ever in denial, that at the time her husband had to do what he did, to survive, like.

A lot of these seizures of art in France during the Nazi occupation -- The Monuments Men shows this in detail -- were held at the Jeu de Paume Museum in Paris to be sorted before being shipped to Germany. At one point or other Goebbels visited and looked at them. This is where Rose Valland surreptitiously kept a meticulous record of of works taken out of the country that was used after the war to reclaim them. Despite Gurlitt's low profile, Valland tracked him down after the war, having left his native Dresden to escape the American fire bombing and gone into hiding at the castle of Baron von Pöllnitz in Bamburg, Bavaria. When captured and interrogated in 1946, Hildebrand claimed most of his collection had been destroyed in fire in Dresden along with his records. The Monuments Men got hold of the 100 works Gurlitt had brought with him in a truck, only a fraction of his collection, but they did not know, or could not prove, that he held more. He made excuses. He pointed to his Jewish background. He said he never dealt with Nazi officials, and so on. To save his own skin, he turned informer on his dealer colleagues. He managed to pass himself off as not an agent of the Nazis but their victim, and he was released.

The rest is the story of bluffing, dodging, and "denazification." Later -- we're not told how -- Hildebrand recovered almost all the artworks that had been in his truck. And obviously a whole lot more. But the film does not nail down how he gathered it all, or how the 1,500 works worth a billion euros got to his son Cornelius in the Munich flat. In his post-war recreation, Gurlitt became director of the "Kuntsverein" of Dusseldorf -- where he settled, apparently a home for ex-Nazis living in plain sight, including Hitler's sculptor and his secretary.

Bentura and her associates interview many sources, including German art dealers, lawyers, and French and German researchers into this part of World War II history, who show how much documentation has been saved or unearthed about all these events. The final phase of the story is the painting over of Nazi history, and the way even today dealers who ought to know better manage to "miss" the illicit origin of an art work that passes through their hands. Money is money, it seems, and sometimes it seems more effort is made to protect the guilty than to help those who have been exploited and stolen from.

Warning to viewers: this film is 95% in French, and the light subtitles, especially when flashed over reproduced pages of printed German or French War era documents, can be almost as hard to read as the English and Chinese subtitles on a pirated Wong Kar-wai videotape of the early Nineties. Best to polish up your French. Because there are not many photos and no films of Gurlitt, the film has done up a lot of pencil drawings of him and his associates and family. They are okay, but not great.

Les marchands d'Hitler (Hitler's Dealers), retitled Dealing with the Devil, 67 mins., was originally presented by France Televisions/TV5Monde 13 February 2015. Screened for this review as part of the 2015 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival.

[Chris Knipp]

CHRISTIAN FAURE: THE LAW/LA LOI: LE COMBAT D'UNE FEMME POUR TOUTES LES FEMMES (2014)


LORANT DEUTSCH, EMMANUELLE DEVOS IN THE LAW

From the camps to the corridors of French power, fighting for women with nerves of steel

This French film has Emmanuelle Devos playing Simone Veil, the French health minister in the mid-Seventies largely responsible for the legalization of abortion in France in 1975.La loi seeks to give legal and political maneuvering some of the edge of a film noir. It's a made-for-TV movie. Well, Christian Faure's 2000 made-for-TV Just a Question of Love/Juste une question d'amour was a winner, a warm and touching gay coming of age film that was a hit and consciousness-raiser in France (available on US DVD). Faure has made fourteen TV movies since then; this is his fifteenth. This time Faure he landed one of France's most interesting and important film actresses of her generation, Emmanuelle Devos, as his lead.

During the discussion of abortion Veil was subject to personal attacks, but the film also enlivens things by focusing on her issues with Secrétaire d'État à la Condition féminine Francoise Giroud (Laure Killing), also, like Veil, Jewish, who made things harder by making it a feminist issue of woman's right over her body, while Veil wanted to focus only on the health issue, the death and suffering caused by illegal abortions. (Veil gets Giroud sidelined.) Meanwhile the film sets up a parallel with a crusading young woman photo-journalist, Diane Riestrof (Flore Bonaventura), who becomes involved in the issue, fighting a feminist battle of her own to be accepted as a serious journalist in a male world of tough newsmen of the magazine L'Express. Diane's scenes take us to the "front," to young women in hospital after botched abortions, and to the campaigners on the pro-abortion side and also the pro-lifers. Diane's chief opponent is Rémy Bourdon (Lannick Gautry), whose news territory she's stepping on. Her ally: Miriam (Anne Girouard), L'Express' librarian. Veil's right hand man in her work is Dominique Le Vert (Lorànt Deutsch). Marceline Loridan (Aurélia Petit) is her best, longtime friend, also a survivor of the camps.

American viewers may find negotiating this melange of figures easier than steering the way through French politics. But we have been getting more of a taste of that in movies recently with the likes of La conquête (2011), about Sarkozy's rise to power; the witty The French Minister (2013) about presidential in-fighting, and, best of the three as a film, The Minister/L'exercice de l'État (also 2011), about a troubled working-class French cabinet minister, directed by Pierre Schoeller and starring the terrific Olivier Gourmet. These show how good the French are at making films about politics. But this, while about a crucial subject, is the kind of film that has lines like "Maybe we should avoid talking to the Left until we find what the Center is going to do."

This is a new kind of role for Devos, who has sometimes played sensitive, eccentric, or insecure women. Here she is cool, elegant, and invincible playing a woman who, as we're told, lost her brother and both parents in the Holocaust and later close remaining relatives in an accident. Miriam, the L'Express documents boss, tells Diane Veil's faraway look is because of all the dead in her life. She has a husband though (Lionel Abelanski) and a small child, neither of whom she has much time for here: the film begins in medias res, and is a portrait of an issue and its heroine, not of a life.

No question of Emmanuelle Devos' character's qualifying for a Jewish Film Festival. Simone Veil was a French survivor of both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, eighteen when the war ended, who returned to France and went on to be a train-blazer in French politics at the highest level decades later, rising to the ministry after years as an attorney and in the Ministry of Justice responsible for prisons, working for improved conditions. She had worked to make the Pill legal in 1967. Note that in France abortion had been criminalized since the Napoleonic Code, and the Vichy régime made it a a capital crime. Veil says in the film there are 300,000 illegal abortions a year in France, and seven deaths a day from them. Her chief opponent causes a stir during the government debate (which Veil starts off) by playing a cassette tape of the loud, fast heartbeat of a fetus only a few weeks old. The three-day debate is punishing. Devos gives a display of sand-froid that is memorable; it's another feather in this wonderful actress' cap.

Using dp Jean-Pierre Hervé's camera work to present scenes at once formal and intimate, Christian Faure delivers a cool, elegant historical film that's well-paced and involving -- if, that is, the issues matter to you and political maneuvering is your thing. Screenwriters Fanny Burdino, Samuel Doux, and Mazarine Pingeo on the whole manage to enliven matters that of necessity involve a good deal of formal exposition. Emmanuelle Devos, Lorànt Deutsch, Flore Bonaventura and the rest never disappoint.

The Law/La loi: le combat d'une femme pour toutes les femmes,87 mins., was shown on French television on 26 November 2014, and was nominated for a Crystal Globe, Best Television Film or Television Series (Meilleur téléfilm ou série télévisée). Screened for this review as part of the 2015 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, 23 July-9 August 2015,

[Chris Knipp]

RICK GOLDSMITH: MIND/GAME: THE UNQUIET JOURNEY OF CHAMIQUE HOLDSCLAW (2014)


CHAMIQUE HOLDSCLAW IN MIND/GAME

Athletic superstar who advocates for understanding of mental illness

Chamique Holdsclaw's life is recounted here, and the story of the 6'2" girl from the Astoria projects in Queens raised by her grandmother is one of the most glittering ones in the history of American sport. However, she had alcoholic parents and a schizophrenic father, and this legacy came to haunt her later. The point of the documentary is to focus on a very prominent sports figure who experienced psychological difficulties (diagnosis of clinical depression after a suicide attempt and a second diagnosis of bipolar disorder after an arrest and being charged with aggravated assault, criminal damage and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony. (Her girlfriend, the object of the assult, who was in her car, fellow WNBA player Jennifer Lacy, was uninjured, but frightened.) Holdsclaw has not only been open about her mental illness and need for psychiatric help and medication, but has coached young basketball hopefuls in learning to recognize and deal with their emotions and has founded the Chamique Holdsclaw Foundation to further her efforts as a "mental health advocate," combating the stigma attached to psychiatric problems. This is particularly true in professional sports, the film shows. Pro athletes are expected to seem invincible and therefore without flaw. Psychological illness is ot accpted as a legitimate illness. It seems that the "stigma" of mental illness particularly haunts the world of sport, though not confined there.

The film is narrated by Glenn Close, who also is an advocate for understanding of mental health issues, having become sensitized to them by having a younger sister who is bipolar and a nephew (her sister's son) with schizoaffective disorder. Close has her own foundation to combat the stigma of mental illness, Bring Change 2 Mind.

Holdsclaw's sports career is spectacular, her personal story is affecting and her personality is engaging. She granted filmmaker Rich Goldsmith intimate access to scenes recounting her personal struggles. However some of the narration is stiff and academic-sounding, and the otherwise good-looking documentary seems standard-issue.

Mind/Game: The Unquiet Journey of Chamique Holdsclaw, 57 mins., debuted at the Nashfillle Festival, showing also at Frameline. Screened for this review as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. The festival blurb says, "Even though Holdsclaw is not Jewish, her struggle and her subsequent advocacy around mental illness issues embody the Jewish concept of tikkun olam, repairing the world through one’s actions." Evidently filmmaker Goldsmith is Jewish, and Holdsclaw is also gay, justifying the Frameline inclusion. However both of these are somewhat artificial pretexts for the inclusion of a basically mainstream doc in specialized fests. This is mainly the story of a black female superstar athlete who has used her fame to campaign for greater understanding of mental illness.

[Chris Knipp]

ÁLVARO BRECHNER: MR. KAPLAN (2014)


HÉCTOR NOGUERA AND NÉSTOR GUZMAN IN MR. KAPLAN

Mutual delusion in search of adventure

Young Uruguayan filmmaker Álvaro Brechner's second feature is a charmer, though it leaves one with a feeling of something unfulfilled. He plays with several themes and genres here. His Mr. Kaplan, played by Chilean-born TV vet Héctor Noguera, is a 76-year-old man, happily married to Rebecca (Nidia Telles) for 50 years, with a successful son (Gustavo Saffores) and comfortable life. But he feels he has failed to achieve anything of lasting importance in life. A sweet, sad little flashback to his childhood shows how his Polish parents sent little Jakob off by himself to "America" to escape the Nazi terror; evidently his family did not live, so survivor guilt, in the opinion of some critics at least, is an element in the craziness that follows. The director calls Jacobo, as he's now known, a "Quixote Schlemazel,"* according to Jay Weissberg in his short Variety review, but as Weissberg says, Jacobo's too comfortable and successful a man to warrant a Yiddish word for an accident-prone loser.

But it's a series of fuckups that lead Jacobo to be assigned a driver, tubby, bibulous ex-cop Wilson Contreras (the many-faceted Néstor Guzzini) as a driver and perhaps minder: he has behaved oddly at a family party, had to be rescued from the pool (he can't swim) and then bumps into a relative's car with his. And then he fails an eye test. He is aging. There are hints he's going gaga. But there is spunk in him yet. And so when he hears his niece Lotote (Nuria Fló), a kind of ally, that there's a German man on the beach now people call "The Nazi," he evolves a fantasy of capturing this man, whose improbable name is Julius Reich (German TV actor Rolf Becker), and taking him to Israel for a trial, like Adolf Eichmann. Wilson has been kicked out of the house by his wife and her father, whose crooked dealings got him ousted from the police, and he's in dire need of an exploit too, and naively buys into Jacobo's fantasy, becoming Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote.

What develops is a comical buddy picture that has some elements of a thriller, also remotely of a Holocaust tale and of a character study about the indignities of growing old. It feels like there could have been more comedy and also more excitement. But both Noguera and Guzman are very watchable and both of them can seem alternately tough, foolish, sad, or silly. Investigation of "The Nazi" leads them to the beach cafe the man runs, and to his sleazy, estranged daughter, who is now a bar prostitute. The two men's efforts to carry out an investigation are absurd, but plausible enough to keep us interested for a while. Then when an actual capture comes there is an interesting revelation about their captive. This is set in the Clinton era, to make it more plausible that a Nazi would still be alive, perhaps. Jacobo originally comes from the village of Sosnowiec, Poland, like the director's own grandfather.

Brechner's story may suggest that for younger Latin American Jews, World War II is a fading dream, but his main interest seems to be in the search for dignity and two men helping each other in a search for dignity; his first film, Bad Day to Go Fishing/Mal día para pescar, also pursues this theme, which resonates nicely in the relationship between Jacobo and Wilson. Weissberg thinks the plot here is "as predictable as your Great-aunt Bella’s matzoh balls." Maybe the movie's greatest weakness is that Brechner is too little invested in it. This is fun anyway, and must have been fun for Noguera and Guzman to play together. But it's not clear if Brechner can become as much of a factor as Daniel Berman, the well-known Argentinian Jewish director. Nor is this as clever as last year's SFJFF Argentinian film, Hernán Guerschuny's El Crítico, which got a US theatrical release. And though this has whimsy, once again there's no rivaling Carlos Sorín's wonderfully understated and unique films set in Patagonia.

Mr. Kaplan,98 mins., has been released in Uruguay, Brazil, Spain and Chile, and played in two dozen international festivals. It was screened for this review as part of the 2015 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival (23 July-9 August 2015). Weissberg says a US theatrical release is coming.

_____________________
*From the Urban Dictionary:
"A 'schlemiel' is the guy most likely to spill the wine at dinner.
A 'schlemazel' is the guy most likely to have the wine spilled on him.
And the 'nudnick' is the guy most likely to ask (in a nasal voice), 'Gee, what kind of wine was that anyhow?'"