Talking about their daughter’s new partner, the heroine’s parents in Kiss Me Kosher say she “scored the triple whammy – lesbian, gentile, and German.”
It’s a typically irreverent joke in a movie that is a mixture of a rom-com and a more serious look at how Israelis deal with prejudice and the past, which is now playing in theaters across North America, with a simultaneous release on video-on-demand and digital platforms including Apple TV, Amazon, ChaiFlicks, and many others, and many cable providers.
It’s one of those stories about how a young couple in love finds their lives complicated when they get serious and their extended families become involved. It brought to mind the recent Julia Roberts-George Clooney movie, Ticket to Paradise, about parents who try to break up their daughter’s relationship with her Balinese fiancé.
But Kiss Me Kosher, written and directed by Shirel Peleg, focuses on a romance between Shira (Moran Rosenblatt of Fauda and We Were the Lucky Ones), an Israeli woman who runs a bar in south Tel Aviv, and Maria (Luise Wolfram, who was in Mathilde and Das Boot), a German botanist.
The plot of the movie
Shira’s bar is called The Jewish Princess, which is owned by her formidable Holocaust survivor grandmother (Rivka Michaeli, who somehow manages to become more fun to watch every year), whose portrait, under the words, “The Real Jewish Princess,” overlooks the entire venue.
Shira is a free spirit who has had many lovers, and she’s the rebellious daughter of an American father (John Carroll Lynch, whom you have seen in dozens of movies and series, notably as Frances McDormand’s husband in Fargo) who has moved his family to a West Bank settlement out of political conviction, and a mother (Irit Kaplan of The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem) who is much more interested in planning Shira’s wedding than in politics.
The story gets going when Maria moves in with Shira, and through a set of rom-com complications, proposes without exactly meaning to. Suddenly, Shira’s mother and girlfriends are pushing for a huge wedding that Shira and especially Maria aren’t sure they want.
Shira’s grandmother, who is having a late-life romance with her Arab doctor neighbor (Salim Daw of Avanti Popolo and The Crown), is dead set against Shira marrying a German, telling her granddaughter: “You’re looking for my bloodiest wound to rub salt into it.” Shira responds, “Sorry for thinking that the person who’s in love with an Arab wouldn’t have a problem with my German!”
That’s typical of some of the dialogue in the movie, which tends to be a bit on the nose, although not necessarily unrealistic, and as Kiss Me Kosher blends slapstick and silly moments with serious social and political commentary, the shifts in tone can be a bit jarring.
A central irony, which the movie exploits for both comedy and drama, is that the German characters embrace Jews warmly, while the Israelis struggle to overcome the trauma of the Holocaust in their dealings with these Germans, all of whom were born after the war ended.
On a visit to Yad Vashem with both families, Shira’s mother tells of her own mother’s Holocaust experience – she was hidden in an attic with her sister while the rest of her family perished – bringing Maria’s mother to tears.
On the same visit, Maria experiences a revelation, telling Shira, “I envy these people [on the Yad Vashem tour].” Shira tells her, “Don’t! They’re paying a fortune to hear the stories I’ve been hearing my whole life for free.”
But Maria says, “I’ve never been able to simply be sad as a person. I always experienced it as a German. I feel guilty about it as a German. I feel ashamed of it as a German. I wonder how it feels when you’re not a German.”
At one point, Maria decides she is done with Shira and her crazy family and is fed up with Israel, but her father points out that she has come to Israel for love. Maria responds, “Love? Where? Everyone here hates each other. Everything is controversial. Everything. Except that every German is hiding a Nazi past.”
Moments like this vividly capture what Israel might feel like to outsiders, but they sometimes overshadow the rom-com aspects of the movie.
It would have been nice to see more of Shira and Maria working on their relationship without being burdened with dialogue about history, because it can be hard to understand why they are both so convinced they have found the great love of their lives, except that the script says they have.
But a terrific and lively cast does great work in both the serious and comic scenes and Kiss Me Kosher is an affectionate and knowing portrait of the diversity of Israeli life.