FILM REVIEW _ `La Petite Jerusalem’: A Film About a `Nice Jewish Girl’ and the Agony of

c. 2006 Religion News Service (UNDATED) To some eyes, perhaps, Laura is the stereotypical image of the nice Jewish girl. She studies hard in college, holds down a work-study job on campus and picks up extra money tutoring. She lives at home with her mother, older sister, brother-in-law, and four rambunctious nieces and nephews. She […]

c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) To some eyes, perhaps, Laura is the stereotypical image of the nice Jewish girl.

She studies hard in college, holds down a work-study job on campus and picks up extra money tutoring. She lives at home with her mother, older sister, brother-in-law, and four rambunctious nieces and nephews. She dresses modestly, doesn’t date, curse or use drugs _ what’s not to like?


But in the eyes of her immigrant Orthodox family, Laura’s in danger of not being Jewish at all.

Why does she insist on studying something as useless as philosophy when every truth is in the Torah? Why won’t she respectfully accept her brother-in-law’s position as head of the house and submit to his authority? Why on earth does this single girl _ yes, still single! _ want to get her own apartment?

With small changes, Laura’s old-fashioned family could pass for any group of recent immigrants. Yet while “La Petite Jerusalem” ends up being universal, director Karin Albou begins by making it specific first, filling it with details of the lives of those North African Jews who now live in France’s suburban apartment blocs, often side-by-side with North African Muslims, and amid simmering resentment.

Laura is tired of that life _ of the superstitious mother always slipping magic talismans under her mattress, of her blandly unquestioning sister and the self-righteous man she is married to, and the imperious way he will begin a family dinner by announcing “I have come to a decision.” She is tired of cant. Instead, she wants Kant _ and the Left Bank, and her independence and her own life.

But Laura’s blind love of pure reason leaves her dangerously vulnerable to passion _ which soon arrives in the shape of a slim Muslim boy, equally tired of family tradition and religious taboos. And this transplanted little Jerusalem begins to roil with conflicts just as furiously as the old one.

Albou clutters her story a bit too much, weaving in a second plot centered on Laura’s sister, and her passionless marriage. There are several unconvincing scenes of Talmudic sex advice _ the sequences are as stilted and didactic as Jill Clayburgh’s therapy sessions in “An Unmarried Woman” _ and a rather pat and hasty conclusion. Although Albou wants to be fair here, and give equal time to both sides _ it’s possible to find fulfillment within religious tradition too, she says _ the scenes fall flat.

Better though, is Laura’s story. Well played by Fanny Valette _ even her pallor seems to match our image of a French philosophy student _ Laura is someone worth rooting for. She doesn’t know, precisely, what she wants. She doesn’t even know what she doesn’t know. But she knows she wants more, even if her efforts to find it turn everything upside down. Because there is no pure reason to passion. And nowhere is it written what really lies in the human heart.


(Unrated. The film contains sexual situations, nudity and violence.)

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FILM CLIP:

“LA PETITE JERUSALEM” A French philosophy student _ and second-generation immigrant from Tunisia _ struggles to find her place as a modern, questioning woman in an Orthodox world of North African tradition and Jewish law. A small, carefully observed world that by concentrating on the specific gradually grows to give us a universal look at generational conflicts and the agonies of assimilation. In French, Hebrew and Arabic, with English subtitles. The film contains sexual situations, nudity and violence. Unrated. RUNNING TIME: 96 minutes. THREE STARS

MO JL END WHITTY

(Stephen Whitty is film critic for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J.)

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