Arts Life
Big Screen/Small Screen
`Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi"
Israeli film, set in a Sephardi home, tells charming coming-of-age story.
TOM TUGEND
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
I
sraeli filmmaker Shemi Zarhin is a
gourmet cook who specializes in
diet-busting cakes.
"I cook Sephardi style, Ashkenazi and
Japanese," Zarhin said in a phone call
from Tel Aviv. "Next time you're in
Israel, come by and I'll show you."
The 16-year-old title character of
Zarhin's film, Bonjour, Monsieur Shlomi,
also cooks up a storm.
Besides the family meals, he also does
the laundry, cleans up, is the peacemaker
in his quarrelsome Moroccan family and
bathes his French-speaking grandfather,
who greets him every morning with the
film's title.
Despite his pains, the wide-eyed
Shlomi is considered stupid by his fami-
ly and in school, where he is flunking
out — and, unfortunately, he accepts
the outside world's assessment of him.
At home, his obsessive mother has
kicked out her hypochondriac husband
for a one-time affair with her best
friend.
Shlomi's older brother, their mother's
favorite, regales the boy with details of
his real and fancied sexual conquests.
But when Shlomi suggests to his girl-
friend that they "upgrade" their relation-
ship --- Hebrew slang for having sex —
she turns him down.
Shlomi's older sister has twin babies
but regularly returns to her mother's
home to detail her fights with her hus-
band, who shamefully surfs the net for
pornography.
It all looks like another story of anoth-
er dysfunctional family, a recurring
theme in Israeli movies, when Shlomi's
life slowly turns around.
A perceptive teacher and a school
principal gradually peel away Shlomi's
.
layers of self-doubt and discover an
exceptional mind and a poetic sensibili-
ty.
A neighboring girl recognizes Shlomi's
real inner worth, and in a beautiful
scene they shyly offer each other their
finest gifts — she the herbs she grows in
her garden and he the decorative cakes
he bakes in the kitchen.
Monsieur Shlomi is a charming film, a
word rarely applied to Israeli movies.
Oshri Cohen portrays Shlomi with
veracity and his relationship with his
grandfather (Arie Elias) is deeply affect-
ing without sinking into sentimentality.
The film is considerably more cheerful
and wide-ranging than most dissections
of adolescent angst. It offers a dash of
humor and some non-graphic sex,
though the language, even in subtitles, is
often profane.
As a bonus, Ashkenazi viewers will get
a much-needed insight into the lifestyle
of Israel's Sephardi Jews, a subject close
to Zarhin's heart.
"I was born in Tiberias, which could
be a very beautiful town; but the reality
was hard, there were lots of unem-
ployed," he recalled. "My family arrived
in Palestine from Morocco and Tangier
200 to 300 years ago. The Ashkenazim
were here only 100 years, but they were
the upper class and we were the under-
class."
Zarhin, now 42, did not describe his
own childhood, but he said with some
emotion, "I was miserable. Childhood is
a waste of time."
Perhaps as an escape, "making films
was my dream from the beginning," he
said. "But it was not easy to get the
money and to leave for a big city like Tel
Aviv."
He went on to graduate from the film
school at Tel Aviv University, started out
making TV commercials, then two fea-
Varnation'
Re-imagining the documentary firm, filmmaker fashions an intimate look at his upbringing.
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN •
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
W
414
10/15
2004
80
hen filmmaker Jonathan
Caouette was a gay Jewish pre-
teen in Houston, he frequent-
ed sock hops at the Baptist church near
his home.
Invariably, church elders warned he
was destined for hellfire: "And I would
tell them that I was possessed by the
devil," Caouette, 31, said.
His tart reply wasn't far from the truth,
according to his new documentary mem-
oir. Tarnation is named with an archaic
term for "damnation." The experimental
self-portrait describes Caouette's hellish
childhood, during which he endured
physical abuse, a mentally ill mother and
brutal foster homes. The raw, hallucina-
tory film is compiled from 20 years of
home movies, answering machine mes-
sages and snippets of underground films
— all edited on a borrowed Apple com-
puter for a total production cost of
$218.32. Lauded as "a category-defying
work of blistering originality," by the
Guardian and "astonishing" by the New
York Times, it won the award for best
documentary at the Los Angeles Film
Festival and a 10-minute standing ova-
tion at Cannes.
If the movie exposes Caouette's child-
hood demons, it's also steeped in a zeit-
geist obsessed with public exorcisms per-
formed on reality television programs
and cringe-fests such as The Jerry Springer
Show.
Caouette has been turning his life into
a kind of reality TV from age 11, when
he first pointed a camera at himself and
his relatives. He recorded family argu-
ments and performed impassioned
monologues influenced by underground
filmmakers such as John Cassavetes and
Paul Morrissey. In one such sequence, he
portrays a battered housewife, "essentially
channeling my mother, who was being
beaten by her second husband," he said.
For the budding cinephile, the camera
became a "protective force field, a means
of controlling and validating the family
chaos," the boyish director said from his
Queens, N.Y., apartment. "It was a
grand way of saying, 'Pinch me, but is
this for real?'"
The reality was that Caouette was liv-
ing with his overwhelmed grandparents
as his mother, Renee, was repeatedly hos-
pitalized for acute bipolar disorder and
schizoaffective disorder. A former child
model, she had suffered mental illness
since undergoing electroshock therapy
following a childhood accident. During a
manic period, she whisked 4-year-old
Jonathan off to Chicago, where she was
kidnapped and raped.
"I remember cowering under a bed
while she was being strangled," the film-
maker said.
Back in Houston, Renee went on a
rampage, breaking windows throughout
the neighborhood with Jonathan in tow.
The boy was promptly placed in a series
of foster homes, where he was sometimes
tied up and beaten.
Renee LeBlanc and Jonathan Caouette in a scene from "Tarnation"