Last year, the opening film of the Jerusalem festival was Andrew Stanton’s Wall-E, Pixar’s ambitious computer-animated film that bridged the silent romances of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin with the dystopic view of the future evoked by Stanley Kubrick and Werner Herzog. The previous year, the opening film was Brad Bird’s Ratatouille, also from Pixar, which, in the guise of a rat with culinary ambitions, really was about an artist’s need for self expression. Both were beautifully crafted and minutely nuanced works of popular art which succeeded mightily in making the most of their rather lofty ambitions. Both made for a rather auspicious and exciting opening to the festival. This year, the film chosen to open the festivities was A Matter of Size, by directors Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor. Seeing as this is the festival with the most Israeli films to date, it seemed appropriate to open with a local film. Upon seeing the film last night, however, I found it to be a rather less than auspicious opening. It seems to be an earnest film that wishes to take on one of the last remaining taboos in this society. Earnestness only gets you so far, however, and this film rarely missed an opportunity to fall into a predictable, unconvincing and false plot turn.
The taboo it attempts to take on is that of obesity. Race, religion, politics, sexual orientation- these are subjects which are tabbed as ‘taboo’, but in reality are generally dealt with in a tame and facile way. Besides- in the liberal world of filmmaking, very little is off-limits. Most incendiary topics have been domesticated to such an extent that it has become very difficult to shock audiences (Though many still try). The issue of obesity, however, is one that is still a genuine taboo. Society has yet to accept obesity as anything other than something to be pitied or mocked. A Matter of Size aims to change that. It presents a thesis that says that fat can be beautiful, and something to be admired, something to strive for. It’s a strange stance for a movie to take. I was ready to be taken for a ride by the film- to envision a world in which obesity is just another state of being, and not the crushing, oppressive force that plagues so many people. I’m not sure I could ever take it as more than fantasy, but I was ready to submit. But this tame, flaccid film was not the place to find such imaginative a concept.
The film stars Itzik Cohen as an obese cook names Herzl. Herzl has just lost his job due to his inability to accept being moved from the bar of a restaurant to the kitchens, something brought on by his obesity (which did not represent the restaurant in the way they’d wanted). Herzl is single, lives with his mother, and is the consistent failure of his weight-watchers meetings. After getting a job as a dishwasher at a small Japanese restaurant, Herzl is astounded to discover that there is a realm in which obesity is not only not a draw-back, but a major plus: the world of Sumo wrestling. He convinces three of his similarly rotund friends to join him in his sojourn into the world of Sumo, as well as Zehava, a woman he fancies whom he met at the weight-watchers meetings. For this, he enlists his boss at the restaurant, who used to be a Sumo-judge (The boss is played by Togo Igawa, a Japanese actor who’s been in a number of big non-Japanese productions, including Memoirs of Geisha, The Last Samurai and Speed Racer, who, impressively, utters most of his dialogue in stilted but understandable Hebrew).
About half-an-hour into this film, I was still with it. It has a fun and bouncy opening, and a bunch of very likable actors populating the action. But every few seconds there came a pointed line or sight gag that about these characters’ weight. Initially, it seemed liked a perfectly acceptable way to go- after all, it is no secret that many obese people will make fun of their situation to preempt jokes from people around them…why shouldn’t the film follow the same practice? The more this went on, however, the less comfortable I became with the jokes. While the earlier jokes were charged with a self-defense mechanism, the more there were, the less valid they seemed to become. They became a crutch, which the filmmakers used whenever they didn’t know how to end a scene.
The final straw came with a very funny sight-gag involving the untimely death of Herzl’s father. We are told that the weight killed his father. Not a heart-attack, though. He was on the porch in their apartment building one day, when the porch buckled under his weight, plunging him to his death. It’s surprising. I laughed. But before I could even react to the implications of the gag, we already have Herzl describing how the first thing he did was crack-up laughing. For a moment there, I was thinking that the film was finally going to own up to its own hypocrisy, of presenting a new take on a subject while still embracing the cultural perception of it- to no avail. The film fails to make a connection between Herzl’s gut reaction to the sight of his father’s death -tragic, yet with a very funny poetic twist- and the audience’s identical reaction to the same event. It came close to perfectly addressing the balance between humor and pathos it was obviously aiming at originally…but allowed it to fizzle. Nothing happens with this crucial scene. It’s not relevant to the remainder of the film, and tellingly, the film ends with laughter about the fate of this fat man.
It all goes down-hill from there. It gets boring, predictable and mushy. I don’t mind mushiness as a rule- indeed I expected some kind of mushiness from this movie. But with this film it felt so fake, so cheap, so unearned…as amiable as the performances are, and as ostensibly charming the tale might be, I found myself really disliking the film as I thought about it. Luckily, the film is so slight that I doubt I’ll be thinking about it at all in the days to come. That’s the great thing about a film festival- if one film is disappointing; another generally arrives promptly to remove the bad taste. I apologize for starting the festival coverage on negative note…but I’m sure things will pick up in the coming days.
SHLOMO PORATH
