Late Marriage

As a movie theatre manager, I see tons of lost souls who go see a film because of a critic’s quote or blurb in its advertising and wind up leaving disappointed. Because of this fact, I almost never use this method to pick a film. I say almost never because I wound up doing just that with a little Israeli film entitled Late Marriage. In my defense, it had really good blurbs. It was billed as “a powerful comedy” and “breathtaking sophisticated and refreshingly adult.” A critic from Fort Worth said, “This is the best movie of the summer,” while another from Time Out New York swears, “it features what may be the single most believable sex scene ever captured on film.” Hell, even The Village Voice raved, and they hate almost everything. With all these quotes in their ads, they unfortunately won’t have room for mine: “It made me want to unbolt my seat from the floor, throw it through the screen, and run screaming for my life.”

The film starts promisingly enough. Zaza (Lior Loui Ashkenazi) is 31 and still in college, getting his Master’s degree in philosophy, but is, remarkably, alone. His parents, Yasha (Moni Moshonov) and Lily (the director’s real mother, Lili Kosashvili) believe in the “old ways” of their native Georgia (the country, not the state), and feel he should stop playing the field and get married to a nice young, Jewish girl. So far, their attempts to hook him up have been fruitless. What his family doesn’t know is that Zaza is stepping out at night to see a local woman, Judith (Ronit Elkabetz). Judith has three strikes against her in the eyes of Zaza’s strict Jewish upbringing: 1) She’s an older woman; 2) She’s divorced; and 3) She’s got a child. Through circumstance, the family comes to find out about Zaza’s secret and confront the lovebirds in an ugly scene at her apartment. The film then comes down to the choice: does he respect the wishes of his family or go with his heart.

Part of any good film is the element of surprise. An audience expects to be taken down a certain path, and it’s the director’s job to lead us there with out making us feel like we’ve been here before. Directors who cheat their way to their endings are rarely respected. I cannot explain my reaction to this film better than this: Based on certain information provided by the film, I expected a certain chain of events to happen. Director Dover Kosashvili, who is working from his own script, stops his film at a certain point and creates its own ending which is completely unsupported by the previous ninety-or-so minutes. He just makes up an ending that is supposed to be sad but happy and filled with meaning. But it is unsupported by anything that happened in the previous ninety minutes. It doesn’t show us what happens to the characters in the time between when the film stops and starts again. The bottom line is that the film cheats, and you know how you feel when someone cheats.

Which is too bad. The film, which has the look and feel of an American-independent, could have been a bittersweet look at a clash between cultures. It is well acted across the board and does not shy away from showing the good and the ugly in its subjects. I just can’t keep coming back to one thing: What were the critics thinking on this one?

Submitted 20 June 02. Posted 09 July 02.