- What About Adolf?: Honestly I didn’t know what to expect before seeing this film. But honestly it kept me on my toes. It’s about a couple named Elisabeth and Stephen, and Elisabeth invites her brother Thomas, her friend Rene and Thomas’s pregnant girlfriend to dinner one evening. When Elisabeth, Thomas, and Rene get to talking about what names Thomas and his girlfriend Anna have picked for their baby, Thomas leads them in a nearly 5 minute guessing game to see if they can correctly guess what the baby’s name will be. Finally, after they give up, Thomas tells them they will name the baby Adolf. Unsurprisingly, Elisabeth, Rene and Stephen are not happy because of Germany’s history with Adolf Hitler and how you can’t really separate the brutal legacy of that man from his name. All of them get into a heated argument about Thomas and Anna naming their baby after a dictator, and when Anna arrives it gets even more heated. Stephen is actually the one who is the most heated out of him, Elisabeth and Rene and gives Thomas all kinds of reasons why he shouldn’t name the baby after a dictator. The movie had all kinds of plot twists in it and sparked a serious and also darkly comic philosophical discussion on namesakes and whether some namesakes are more appropriate than others.
- The Class: I saw one other French language film before this one called The Intouchables, and it was an incredible movie. I also really loved this one. I saw the movie Freedom Writers and it kind of reminded me of it. However, the way the education system is depicted in France is different from the way the education system is depicted in Freedom Writers, which took place in the United States. It’s based on a semiautobiographical novel and it’s about a white teacher in an inner-city school (apparently the guy who wrote the novel plays the main character in the film) who navigates how to inspire his students in their learning.
- The Lunchbox: This is a really touching film. Seeing as how most of the movies I watch contain a lot of intense violence (ok, maybe not Quentin Tarantino violence, but I’m guessing you know what I mean) I needed this film to balance out my film repertoire. This movie is a beautiful story about how a woman who makes lunch as part of a lunchbox system in Mumbai where people deliver lunchboxes to employees at an office. The lunch the woman makes ends up going to to a guy who is almost retiring from work and has lost his wife and is feeling rather lonely and depressed. The food he makes for her is delicious and he writes little notes to her to express his appreciation for her food. Their exchange via notes develops into a powerful friendship over the course of the film. Honestly, watching the movie made me hungry for Indian food and it made me want to go back to India because I really loved the food there.
- The Women’s Balcony: I haven’t seen too many movies set in Israel, and the movies and shows that I do watch about Judaism are usually set in America (Uncut Gems, A Serious Man, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel). This movie is about a synagogue in Israel that has a balcony for the women who attend the synagogue, but when the balcony collapses, the women try to raise money to get a new balcony, only to get pushback from their husbands and the young rabbi who keeps trying to put down their plans. Nevertheless, these women persevere even if the men keep telling them that their plan won’t work, and eventually they win some of the men over to their side to support their plan to build a new balcony. It truly was a beautiful film. I read a book a while ago called Being Jewish by Ari Goldman, and reading it gave me some pretty good insight that was helpful when watching this movie, especially because there are differences between the denominations of Judaism that I didn’t really know about before reading the book and watching The Women’s Balcony.
The Arts Are Life 