Reviews of Recent Independent, Foreign, & Documentary Films in Theaters and DVD/Home Video
Directed & Produced by: Pearl Gluck. Director of Photography: William Tyler Smith. Edited by: Zelda Greenstein. Music by: Frank London. Released by: Zeitgeist. Language: English, Yiddish & Hungarian with English subtitles. Country of Origin: USA. 77 min. Not Rated. DVD Features: Odds and Ends: 30 minutes of additional footage, with Q & As & follow-ups. Trailer. Yiddish & English subtitles.
Raised a Hasidic Jew, Pearl Gluck’s childhood fantasy was to graduate from high
school, marry a Torah scholar and have 10 kids. A lot has
changed since then. The filmmaker’s parents divorced when she was
10, propelling her into a secular Manhattan lifestyle instead of a
religious one in Brooklyn. Since the divorce, Gluck’s
relationship with her ultra-religious father has been shaky – he wants
her only to marry and have kids. In part to rekindle their
relationship and also to discover her roots and family history, Gluck
travels to Hungary to retrieve a family heirloom, a couch on which
important rabbis once slept. The documentary chronicles Gluck’s journey to
recover the couch and come to terms with her Judaism and her family.
Accompanied by a klezmer soundtrack, Gluck combines family home videos with
scenes of her European trip and interviews with Jewish friends, who
have also become less religious over the years. Her
personal journey is interesting and she is enthusiastic, but the viewer isn’t
fully invested.
In one scene, Gluck peers into the oven of a Hungarian bakery and the
audience can almost smell the warm chocolate cake. She tells us that
these bakers, along with wig makers and other community members, are
full of the old Yiddish tales she wants to recover. While the couch is
her main mission, her trip to Hungary was funded by a Fulbright grant
designed to gather old Yiddish tales. But we never hear these stories
and are left wanting more. The DVD extras provide a few more
interesting details on the divan, but most of the relevant information is already
in the film. Deborah Lynn Blumberg
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