Way Down South

Jerry Lewis with Stella Stevens in “The Nutty Professor.”

Jerry Lewis with Stella Stevens in “The Nutty Professor.”

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

In the past 20 years, Latin
American cinema has sprung triumphantly back to life with “new wave” movements reviving film art in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico and young filmmakers blazing new paths in Uruguay and Bolivia. Coincidentally, many of the new filmmakers have been Jewish, from Argentina’s Martin Rejtman and Daniel Burman to Mexico’s Alejandro Springall and Peru’s Lorry Salcedo Mitrani.

Three of the new films on display as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s 12th annual Latinbeat festival, a showcase of new cinema from Ibero-American filmmakers, were made by Jews and center on the Jewish experience in Mexico (“Nora’s Will” by Mariana Chenillo), Uruguay (“Acne” by Federico Veiroj) and Argentina (“The Camera Obscura” by Maria Victoria Menis).

Intriguingly,

all three are coming-of-age films. In a way. “Acne” and “Camera Obscura” are about a bar mitzvah boy and a young immigrant woman finding their footing as part of the process of growing up, a conventional enough narrative arc. But the stunning “Nora’s Will” is about man in his 60s growing up and accepting the reality of family responsibilities, a bit less common.

For the first half of its 92-minute running time, “Nora’s Will” is the bleakest and most sardonic of black comedies. The premise of the film is simple. A couple of days before Passover, Nora prepares her house for the holiday, then quietly takes several bottles of medication and dies in her own bed. Her ex-husband Jose (Fernando Luján), who lives across the street, finds her and sets in motion the machinery of mourning and burial. Except, of course, that in the case of a suicide and a chaotic family constellation, the machinery stubbornly refuses to run smoothly.

And for about 45 minutes, the mounting complications are quietly but joltingly funny in a bleak, deadpan manner that are fueled by the remarkable subtlety of Luján’s performance as a cynical, weary man who has suffered with his wife’s (or as he keeps reminding the rabbi, “ex-”) 14 suicide attempts and emotional manipulations.

But in the second half of the film, with the arrival of their son, his wife and two little girls, the humor is quite deliberately drained out of the film. Slowly, almost agonizingly slowly, the family tensions are aired and, finally, exorcised, and Jose is redeemed and redeems, a perfect conclusion for a film that closes with a seder, with its promise of redemption.

The Latinbeat Film Festival 2009 runs at the Walter Reade Theatre (70 Lincoln Center Plaza) from Sept. 9-24. For more information, go to www.filmlinc.com.
A Jerry Lewis Retrospective, Seriously
OK, we’ve all heard all the jokes about the French and Jerry Lewis. But it is long past the time when Lewis deserved and deserves a re-evaluation of his own. This fall, with the publication of Chris Fujiwara’s critical appreciation, “Jerry Lewis” by University of Illinois Press, and a long overdue retrospective (at Anthology Film Archives) of Lewis’ work as a director, the imbalance is being addressed.

Like Orson Welles, Lewis is considered by conventional wisdom to have been a talent that was best experienced when young. Even his detractors will probably admit that his work with Dean Martin is funny, although that is about as far as they will go. If they’re being generous, they’ll add that the two films the duo made with Frank Tashlin have a pop-art kind of cartoonish energy, and that as a serious actor in “King of Comedy” and the garment industry episodes of “Wiseguy,” Lewis revealed heretofore hidden facets of his talent. But they shy away from his films as a director.

Part of the problem is that, like Welles, Lewis the performer at his most excessive is inextricably linked to his directorial persona. You can no more pry Jerry out of the mise-en-scene of, say, “The Family Jewels,” than you can separate Welles from the baroque surfaces of “Mr. Arkadin.”

And Lewis’ persona and his directorial style are about that excess. It’s the over-the-top, nearly hysterical surplus of the barely assimilated immigrant, garish but vibrant, tacky but energetic. Lewis the director pushes Lewis the clown beyond the gleeful vulgarity of the Tashlin films (“Artists and Models” and “Hollywood or Bust”) into something else entirely. At his best, in “The Nutty Professor,” Lewis is able to achieve some critical distance from the messiness and the result is one of the great American comedies and one of the key films of the 1960s. At his worst, the result is simultaneously stutteringly funny, cloyingly sentimental and unrelentingly confused.

But never dull. By all means, never, ever dull.
The Jerry Lewis retrospective will run Nov. 12-19 at Anthology Film Archives (Second Avenue and Second Street.).

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