Monday, January 6, 2020

The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch

The last shot encapsulates the film. It’s a high angle shot of a carefully designed public garden with a striking symmetrical pattern. This is Order writ in foliage. 
Hero Motti sits outside the upper frame, on a bench, as he receives a phone call from Laura. She’s the gentile classmate (aka shiksa) for whom he was prepared to abandon his family and his Jewish life. As the garden image suggests, he has removed himself from his orthodox Swiss Jewish family’s tightly structured order and is moving through the outside wilds. 
  In a Hitchcock film the high-angle shot — dramatically looking down — would signify the birds’ eye view (in the opening of Psycho as in the eponymous classic). In a film about orthodox Jews it’s rather God’s view down on the hapless mortals struggling over their souls amid sometimes suffocating religious constraints. (See the controversial Israeli Fox Trot for similar intrusions.)  Where the low angle shot makes the figures seem larger, heroic (e.g., the strutting toy soldier in Fox Trot) the high angle evokes “what fools these mortals be.”   
As Motti rises and leaves we don’t know if he has picked up the call or what his response to Laura’s (presumably inviting) message might be. As we’re left — literally — hanging we’re reminded of the film’s most resonant phrase. It’s the motto of Motti’s dad’s insurance company: “You never know what will happen.” That phrase explains why people feel the need to buy insurance … and to have its metaphysical extension, a religion. 
That’s the phrase Motti teaches Laura and that she produces to demonstrate to his parents her interest in their yiddish. But it’s also the key to the film’s witty, spirited examination of any tight community, its defensive exclusivity and the reward its support provides faithful members. You don’t have to be Jewish but….
  In this coming of age story Motti’s discovery of sexual freedom is paralleled by a rhetorical wildness — his direct addresses to the camera and the insertion of irregular material, as in his summary of the Jewish boy’s expected life. So, too, the film’s moral center is the wealthy woman still smoking through her last days of stage four cancer. Her tarot readings recommend his freeing himself from all restraints and conventions, to make his own life as he wants. In body, spirit, wisdom and honesty, she’s the antithesis to Motti’s standard issue yiddishe momma. 
Ironically, he doesn’t lose his virginity to his dream shicksa but to a Jewish spiritualist he meets at the Israeli yoga class run by the rabbi to whom his own family’s rabbi has despatched him for a more conventional marital salvation. As a parellel to the dying woman, the rabbi who weaves eastern mysticism into his Judaism — “Om—Shalom”—provides another example of inflecting one’s religious/cultural heritage to fit personal needs.
     The title makes the hero’s rebellious adventure seem natural: The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch. “Into the arms of a shicksa,” adds an opening title. As Wolkenbruch means ‘clouburst’ the hero’s breakout seems as natural — and nourishing — as a rainfall, another gift from the heavens, however discomfiting. 

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