Jewish Advocate

Three tales come to life

By George Robinson - Friday July 4 2008


Old love stories from I. B. Singer

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Although filmmaker Jan Schutte describes himself as “very German,” he happily acknowledges that he understands spoken Yiddish pretty well.
“It’s very close to the dialect of German spoken in the part of the south that I come from,” he explains on a sultry afternoon in midtown Manhattan. “I have less trouble understanding Yiddish speakers than I do some people from the north of Germany.”
Surprisingly, that is not what drew Schutte to the writings of Isaac Bashevis Singer, three of whose shorts stories he has adapted for his new film, “Love Comes Lately,” which opened in New York last month.
Schutte is a tall, slender man in his 40s, with gray hair and a soft voice. He has lived in New York at several times in the past, and his English is fluent.
“I had first read Singer in the 1980s,” Schutte recalls, “and I fell in love with him. I was just fascinated by his characters, and so many of the stories were just great for a movie.”
It was an idea he filed away in the back of his mind, returning to it when he found himself reading Singer again and suddenly realized that so many of the later stories were set in contemporary America. (Doing a period film, even in Europe, is an expensive proposition, while contemporary America is, well, right here now.)
“I played around with several ideas for a screenplay,” Schutte explains.
“I had made a very successful short film of the story ‘Old Love’ and so I knew I would want to use that film pretty much intact. I wanted to have three of Singer’s stories in the film, I wanted to use Otto Taussig [the distinguished Austrian actor, who plays a character based more than slightly on Singer] as the male lead, and I knew I definitely didn’t want to make an episodic film.”
He also wanted to make a film that would reflect the extraordinary range of Singer’s moods and concerns, a film that would be, by turns, comic, nostalgic, tragic and mystical.
“I wanted to touch all the areas of Singer’s work,” he says, a tall order in a film that is just under 90 minutes duration.
The result is surprisingly sprightly, thanks in no small part to Schutte’s cleverly structured screenplay and Taussig’s knowing, randy, feisty performance as an 80-something famous writer who still can’t resist a good meal, a good story or a pretty face (not necessarily in that order).
Schutte chose “Old Love,” “The Briefcase” and “Alone” for his film, and he integrates the stories fairly seamlessly, using Taussig’s presence in all three to weld the unrelated narratives in a way that is at once believable, logical and satisfying. He uses the repetition of key lines of dialogue and gestures to reinforce the perception that all three stories are the product of a single consciousness, that of the Max Kohn (Taussig), the Singer-like writer.
Although Kohn and his various lady loves (Tovah Feldshuh, Rhea Perlman, Barbara Hershey) are obviously New York Jews of a certain age (with the notable exception of Elizabeth Pena, and even she seems to be passing), the Jewishness of the protagonists and situations is understated, perhaps because Schutte himself, while clearly a philo-Semite, is not a Jew.
“In the end, I think the film is more about creativity and the writing process than about Jewishness,” Schutte says. “Of course Singer wrote about a very Jewish kind of storytelling, but the American stories are all about age and how you deal with.”
That said, how much of Taussig’s performance – and Kohn’s character as written by Schutte – is really I.B. Singer?
“Max is Singer, somewhat,” Schutte says with a faint smile. “Of course, he’s also partly Otto. There is a beautiful documentary about Singer made by Avrom Novak in the 1980s, and I looked at that before we started. The room that is his study in our film was based entirely on the documentary – it is a complete mess.”
Schutte cautions those who would project a little too much Singer into the main character his adaptation, “[Max] is a writer who faces more fears and anxieties in his stories than in his real life. The relationship between a fictional character and his creator’s life is never one-to-one. Even autobiography is a kind of fiction.”
And, one would add in mild rebuttal, vice versa.

Visit my blog at www.cine-journal.blogspot.com.

“Love Comes Lately” opens at the Kendall Square Cinema on July 11.
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