SAN FRANCISCO JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL | SFJFF 2010

Screens with Memory Paths

Screens with Perfect Mother

In the gorgeous snowy melancholy of winter we meet Simon Wolberg, Jewish mayor of a small town in French Basque country. If Jewish and mayor and Basque are words you don’t expect to hear strung together, no one is more cognizant of this than Simon himself. As mayor, he has vowed to modernize this isolated burg and largely succeeds. As paterfamilias, he provides his family with the effortless life and sleekly contemporary home of the provincial bourgeois. But more than a mayor, more than a father, Simon has acted the role of rabbi—the young, eccentric kind who brings rock-and-roll to Hebrew school in an effort to keep the young people engaged—and sometimes the role of God. Now, both his town and family have outgrown his nourishing, controlling ways. The elegant directorial debut of French screenwriter Axelle Ropert looks at a family and society coming of age and coming apart, and says this is not necessarily a bad thing. Ropert offers an offbeat, intimate view of smart, naturally articulate characters: Simon (François Damiens), whose defensive moxie befits the post-Shoah generation; his wife Marianne (Valérie Benguigui) and teenage daughter Delphine (Léopoldine Serre), each in her own way exhorting Simon to change before it’s too late. Of course, no one knows better than Simon that it is too late.—Judy Bloch

Reviews