What a film the young Israeli writer-director Dover Kosashvili could have made of Goodbye, Columbus.
He may not be the stylist Philip Roth is, but he has a similar talent for capturing the exact weight of erotic gestures and of anti-erotic family pressures. In his feature debut, Late Marriage, Kosashvili drops an amorous intellectual named Zaza (Lior Loui Ashkenazi) into a middle-class Soviet Georgian immigrant circle as materialistic and tightly knit as Roth's nouveau riche New Jerseyites. Like Roth, Kosashvili knows his characters so well, and conveys his understanding so fully, that he never merely snickers at the gaudiness of their apartments or the conventionality of their aspirations -- he appreciates what it took for them to achieve stability, and he respects their fervent appetites. Unfortunately for the graduate student Zaza, their grasp on life becomes a death grip on his love life.
Zaza, 31, hasn't married yet because he's having an intense affair with a 34-year-old Moroccan divorcee, Judith (Ronit Elkabetz), who has a 6-year-old daughter, Madonna (Sapir Kugman). The phrase "older and divorced single mother" contains three taboos for Zaza's father, Yasha (Moni Moshonov) and his mother, Lili (Lili Kosashvili, the director's real-life mother). Even when they try to match Zaza with a beautiful 17-year-old Georgian girl who is actually a budding voluptuary, he can't take his mind off Judith. Yet when he's with Judith, he's unable to pretend that he can break away from his parents. In Kosashvili's world, husbands rule not like pashas, but like tribal patriarchs who will be disciplined by their own brothers and brothers-in-law if they stray from the proper route or fail to respect their wives. (It's hard to tell which parent holds more sway over a son.)
