Ushpizin

The Israeli comedy Ushpizin begins something like Guy Ritchie’s Snatch and ends like the Coen brothers’ Raising Arizona – in between it’s a wholly original movie, the first film (so far as I know) set and filmed entirely within the insular realm of Jerusalem’s ultra-orthodox Hasidim. Forget A Price Above Rubies – the real jewel that everyone seems to be coveting in the holy city is a lumpy yellow citrus fruit known as the ethrog. The bitter citron plays a key role in the Jewish holiday of Sukkoth, a thanksgiving for the autumn harvest that is symbolically commemorated by observant Jews by moving out of their homes and into temporary shelters known as sukkahs for the duration of the weeklong holiday. For the less observant this usually means a hastily lashed-together assemblage of sticks and reeds, but for poor-but-penitent Rebbe Moshe (Rand) and his wife, Mali (Rand’s real-life spouse, Michal), it means moving their entire household into a sturdy, respectable sukkah in the middle of their neighborhood. Without money, however, there’s no way to do that, much less pay off the landlord whose persistent knocking is driving the childless pair to distraction. Clearly, a miracle is called for, and after much fervent prayer from both husband and wife, a pair of miracles manifest in the form of an anonymous 1,000 American dollars slipped under their door and the unexpected but rebbe-sanctioned use of an idle sukkah from another part of town. It’s all the happy couple can do not to explode from joy over their good fortune – or, possibly, from Mali’s ceaseless culinary wizardry. Yet woe of a certain sort follows quickly on the heels of their luck in the form of two gregarious prison escapees: Eliyahu "Scorpio" (Mizrahi) and Yossef (Gannai), who know the once-wayward Moshe from the proverbial bad old days. Abiding by their duty to Talmudic scripture, which commands that all Sukkoth guests be welcomed with open arms no matter who they are or how dodgy their pasts and their loyalty to each other, Moshe and Mali find themselves tested as no couple since Abraham and Sarah, who, as Mali wryly observes, also had to endure some very Job-like trials before they, too, could conceive a child. For all its obvious religious overtones, Ushpizin’s basic setup is as secular as they come. The shekel-less young couple might as well be in Crown Heights as Old Jerusalem – or Sheboygan, for that matter – and their fortunes, both good and ill, will be instantly familiar to anyone who’s ever struggled to keep hearth and home together in the face of fiscal malaise. Rand, who also wrote the witty, breezy script, is a formidable name on the Israeli stage and screen, who abandoned his craft for the real-world rigors of the Hasidim he so ably portrays in this film (for which he sought and received a special rabbinical dispensation to perform in). The film rests squarely on the backs of Rand and his wife, who snatches the spotlight from her professionally trained husband in her acting debut. Tellingly, the film’s title translates as "guests" in ancient Aramaic, which echoes not only the couple’s household but the overarching Torah message of the transient nature of worldly life. And that’s something almost any religious group can identify with, even if your only higher spiritual calling is true love.