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"