Little Jerusalem (2005) – DVD

La Petite Jérusalem
**/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras N/A
starring Fanny Valette, Elsa Zylberstein, Bruno Todeschini, Hédi Tillette de Clermont-Tonnerre
written and directed by Karin Albou

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover The deck of Little Jerusalem (La Petite Jérusalem) is so obviously stacked from the very beginning that it's not much fun to actually play the game. We know from the outset that its philosophy-student heroine, Laura (Fanny Valette), is going to fly the coop from her stifling Orthodox Jewish home. (A few stern words from her married sister Mathilde (Elsa Zylberstein) are deemed sufficient grease for the wheels of antagonism for the full 94 minutes.) Laura's fall from vacillation between the two stools doesn't feel like much of a struggle, even though her Kantian walks upset her proper family (they'd rather see her hitched and making babies); it's hard to rally much enthusiasm for the film's foregone conclusions, which are telegraphed at that. Little Jerusalem is painless enough, but there's no there there, and the whole thing evaporates minutes after you've sat through it.

Laura's transformation doesn't offer many surprises. Of course she falls in love with the wrong non-Jew–in this case, Arab co-worker Djamel (Hédi Tillette de Clermonte-Tonnerre). Of course her mother (Sonia Tahar) is predisposed towards her daughter giving up her studies. And of course ultra-pious Mathilde gets disappointed by her straying husband Ariel (Bruno Todeschini), leading to a marriage counsellor's eye-opening revelation that coital pleasure is not against God's law. All very obvious story beats, all very obviously leading up to a moral that stands for freedom from a stifling religion. That the screenplay won a prize at Cannes is amazing: however writerly, it's really quite broad.

Writer-director Karin Albou tries to sell the rather mechanical script with a Bazinian realist style. No matter how forced or expository the exchange, the camera does not cut in, simply observing the action "naturally." This has the effect of loosening up what could have been stifling, though it can't actually cover up the deficiencies of the text. The more the style keeps cuing you to the reality of the action, the more you're reminded that it's not terribly convincing: far from hiding the wires, it exposes them as part of the machine. The talented cast also does what it can with the situation, but again their unforced approach to the roles underlines the forced nature of the situations. Nothing peripheral can triumph against a screenplay that's at once the main event and the kiss of death.

Aside from the occasional intrusion of anti-Semitic attacks (a synagogue is torched; masked thugs attack Ariel at a soccer field), Little Jerusalem fails to give a charge to any of its hugely painful events. This is most apparent when Djamel brings Laura home to meet mother and mother is scandalized by her son's choice of mate: It's an obligatory scene with a "Degrassi"–sized tin ear that only serves to embarrass you when it ought to be breaking your heart. (Bazin doesn't help in this case: the approach defuses the tension when it should be ratcheted up). The film is hardly disgraceful, but it's only "worthy": if it's not exploitive or melodramatic, neither is it very creative or insightful. We don't learn much more about Orthodox Judaism than we already gathered, and we leave entirely unmoved.

THE DVD
Warner/Seville's Canadian import DVD won't move you, either. The 1.85:1, 16×9-enhanced image is a little murky: shadow detail is poor and the grey-blue colour scheme is often beset by bleed-through. The Dolby 2.0 stereo sound is somewhat better, if a little faint and lacking in dynamism. The only extra is Fanny Valette's screen test (5 mins.), but sorry Anglos: no subtitles.

94 minutes; NR; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); French DD 2.0 (Stereo); English (optional) subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Seville