Joyce Glasser reviews Between the Temples (August 23, 2024) Cert 15, 111 mins. In cinemas
Who doesn’t relish the prospect of a Jewish Harold and Maude that might have been an unpublished script left behind in Hampstead by Sigmund Freud? With the punny title, its Jewish director and co-writer Nathan Silver and two Jewish co-stars, Jason Schwartzman and Carol Kane, Between the Temples is a pre-7 October 2023 rom com, but a dark one, nonetheless.
Dark because the two protagonists, separated by an age gap but united by a past connection to singing and security, need one another to fill a void in their unhappy, destabilised lives.
Unfortunately, it sounds better than it is because the characters are unsympathetic and annoying and the butt of the social satire is an undeserving Jewish temple and its worshippers.
Ben Gottlieb (Schwartzman) is a middle-aged cantor in a tightknit Jewish congregation in upstate New York. He is so traumatised by the death of his novelist wife – who slipped on the ice in a freak accident that will be echoed later in the film – that he has quite literally lost his voice.
Unable to function, Ben has moved back in with his understanding mother Meira (Caroline Aaron) and her partner, Ben’s stepmother, and a convert to the faith, Judith (Dolly de Leon, Triangle of Sadness). His sympathetic boss, Rabbi Bruce (Robert Smigel) keeps Ben on the payroll, although there’s no budget for a substitute cantor.
After a humiliating attempt to perform at a service, Ben heads for a sleazy karaoke bar where he gets knocked out in a brawl. He comes too under the scrutiny of karaoke singer, Carla O’Connor (Kane) with a halo of blond, curly hair. She asks, ‘can I help you?’
It so happens she can, more than either of them – or the audience – imagine. As coincidence would have it, Carla was young Ben’s (Jacob Morrell) music teacher in school, the encouraging force behind his choice of career.
Less convincingly, it so happens that Ben can help Carla, too. Suddenly, though 50 years late, she wants to have a Bat Mitzvah. She explains away the Catholic name O’Connor. It was her late husband’s. Ben refuses nonetheless and Carla, obnoxious and brash but definitely not funny, stalks Ben until he gives in.
If Carla, who has gone through her life as a non-practising Jew and can’t sing has some altruistic, ulterior motive for forcing Ben to take her on as his pupil, it is not apparent. But as it happens, however, the closeness of their relationship, which includes platonic sleepovers at Carla’s house in the peaceful countryside, proves therapeutic.
At a climatic pre-Bat Mitzvah shabbat dinner at the Gottlieb’s house Ben finds his metaphorical voice (though not his singing voice), but so crudely and hurtfully, that he upsets the guests and sends Carla running. With echoes of The Graduate, Ben runs after her.
Jason Schwartzman, who is best known as Wes Anderson’s muse, having starred and co-starred in seven of Anderson’s quirky films here plays a self-absorbed anti-hero who is hard to care about. We celebrate older actresses, especially when their roles (Hester Street, Annie Hall, When a Stranger Calls) are as memorable as those Carol Kane’s, but the casting works better on paper than in practice.
There is no chemistry between the two actors, or their characters and the scene that is needed, where Carla sings or plays an instrument so beautifully it inspires Ben to start singing again, cannot happen. Although her character was a music teacher she can neither sing nor play an instrument.
But the big problem with the film is that the Bat Mitzvah is not just about singing a memorised part of the Torah as the film would have us believe.
The reason Carla’s Bat Mitzvah could not be rushed to fit the schedule of the children who started the course earlier, is not because Carla cannot learn the chanting, which she can. The chanting ceremony at age 13, is the culmination of a year’s worth of studying how to lead a Jewish life. It’s obvious from the Shabbot dinner that Carla has not even learnt the basics of Jewish life and has shown no interest in learning them.
No one (except Carla’s son who was not brought up Jewish) is so repressively orthodox that they make the targets that writers S Mason Wells and Silver need for their film to make sense. Ben’s parents are supportive, laissez-faire lesbians; Rabbi Bruce is non-judgmental, flexible and generous and all his pretty, single daughter Gabby (Madeline Weinstein) has done is to take a shine to a depressed Ben.
Taking a page out of his deceased wife’s explicitly sexual book, Gabby has sex with him in a car. She is hardly the uptight, prudish Rabbi’s daughter. Yet as if to punish her for showing an interest in him, Ben is particularly hurtful to her at the Shabbot dinner.
There is no explanation for the winter-spring couple’s contempt of those around them. Yet their rebellion against the enemy of love: organised religion with its traditional relationships, must surely be the point of a film that is as much social satire as rom-com.
