San Francisco Jewish Film Festival 2023

[Chris Knipp]

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San Francisco Jewish Film Festival July 20–August 6, 2023

FORUM THREAD (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?5345-San-Francisco-Jewish-Film-Festival-2023&p=41334#post41334)

LINKS TO REVIEWS:
Erica Jong - Breaking the Wall (Kaspar Kssics 2022) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?5344-San-Francisco-Jewish-Film-Festival-2023&p=41353#post41353)
Food and Country (Laura Gabbert 2023) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?5344-San-Francisco-Jewish-Film-Festival-2023&p=41340#post41340)
Nathan-ism (Elon Golod 2023) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?5344-San-Francisco-Jewish-Film-Festival-2023&p=41343#post41343)
Plan C (Tracy Droz Tragos 2023) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?5344-San-Francisco-Jewish-Film-Festival-2023&p=41335#post41335)
Portrait of the Artist's Daughter, Oil on Canvas (Margarita Linton 2022) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?5344-San-Francisco-Jewish-Film-Festival-2023&p=41342#post41342)
Savoy (Zohar Wagner 2022) (http://www.filmleaf.net/showthread.php?5344-San-Francisco-Jewish-Film-Festival-2023&p=41333#post41333)

The festival coverage reviews begin here:

[Chris Knipp]

ZOHAR WAGNER: SAVOY (2022)

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A recreation of the 1975 Tel Aviv Savoy Hotel attack

The filmmaker, who's 53 but displays a sparkling girlish photo on her IMDb page, debuted as a feature director 17 years ago (she was in TV before) with an under-an-hour film titled Zorki (her nickname), about how she exposed her mother's five-year adulterous affair to which she was an accomplice while in her teens. Here, she approaches matter of wider import: the violent 1975 Palestinian attack on Tel Aviv's Savoy Hotel. But adultery is still the starting point.

With a crudely insistent score and a mix of archival and invented material,Savoy is a simple but effective recreation of this moment that stirred the whole country, when the invaders used hostages to demand the release of ten Palestinians held in Israeli prisons to be sent to Syria under the supervision of the French ambassador. She jumps right into it, from bedroom to gunshots to full-on chaos, with no lead-up or suspense.

Wagner's narrative pathway into the event is the diary of a woman called Kohava Levi, a 31-year-old housewife, caught at the hotel in bed with a man with whom she was having an adulterous affair. The voiceover comes from a diary Kohava kept at the time, which starts off with complaints of such bourgeois problems as loneliness and a need to write poetry. Kohava is of Yemeni descent and can speak Arabic. She offers herself as an interpreter for the terrorists. Of course some Israeli authorities who come to the scene know Arabic, but she does act as an initial go-between.

Kohava's actual diary and actual sound recordings are used by Wagner to recreate the chaotic scene. Kohava explains to one invader her name is like "Kawkab" in Arabic, "star." She is mistaken for a hotel maid, which may be to her advantage - though, of course, it will not stick. Who she is and what she has been doing will come out, and her efforts at heroism will not cover the embarrassing situation she has been caught in at the hotel. (The man she was with, whose wound she tends to, seems quite ready to let her go as events play out.)

Stern inter-titles announce events such as the arrival on the scene of Israeli Defenise Minister Shimon Peres and senior military officials. For this actual stills and sound are provided. Authorities tell the invaders they "come in peace," while lining up snipers and bringing in 300 troops. Tape recording (a man is shown playing a reel-to-reel) recreates dialogue between the "terrorists" as the Israeli's call them (though they politely address them as "fada'i") and the Israeli officials.

The invaders have boxes of explosives to blow up the place and give the authorities four hours to accede to their demands. Rather than negotiate the Israelis, as their assemblage of forces would imply, assault the hotel. Result: they kill all but one of the invaders. Unfortunately as happens in such cases half the hostages die too.

The film includes Arabic reports on the attack of that time, with their glowing descriptions of the participating fadayeen who grew up in refugee camps under miserable conditions imposed by Israel and how they sailed to Tel Aviv - from reports that were broadcast throughout the Arab world.

It's clear that Kohava was herself an outsider, and so a natural go-between. She suffered in a kibbutz, where she requested they send her to university to study literature and then enrolled her in cooking classes. That she learned Arabic from kids in her neighborhood shows it wasn't a "good" neighborhood, and she identified with the oppressed people even as a youth. But while she said in her written report "the terrorists behaved well," in her testimony at the trial of the captured assailant she withdrew that. Her sympathy for the "enemy" could not survive public scrutiny.

Another dramatic illustration of the state of perpetual war in which Israelis and Palestinians live. Wagner has constructed a rather volatile hybrid of imaginary reenactments of scenes at the hotel and multi-media archival materials.

Reviewed here as part of the 2023 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival Scheduled:
Thursday August 3, 2023
5:45 p.m.
Piedmont Theatre

[Chris Knipp]

TRACY DROZ TRAGOS: PLAN C (2023)

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Up to and after the fall of Roe v. Wade

One year after the Supreme Court's anti-abortion Dobbs decision, abortion access is dangerously limited, while support for abortion spikes nationwide. This film, which could not be more timely, focuses on a secret group of women organized to make abortion pills available to women who need them More and more they do this through distribution of abortion medication, known as Plan C. (The morning-after pill is known as Plan B.) The group operates under the radar because in many states, abortion is illegal, a situation that is increasing. Plan C works in the film to keep hope alive during a global pandemic and continue to do so under much higher pressure after the Dobbs decision.

This is a breathless talking heads film and it seems exhausting, and to some degree it is repetitive. But it is important material and there is much excitement and energy in it.

There are a lot more men than women in this film, and hence it's an illustration of how much women may be on their own sometimes when it comes to protecting their own bodies and their own health as women. There are real heroes/heroines here, the leaders and elders who have been at this a long time and don't flag for a minute now. Chief among these are Plan C founders Francine Coeytaux and Elisa Wells. We understand from Plan C that this is a cause, and an urgent one. And that it is a matter of a thousand little details and differences from state to state. Note that Coeyteux and Wells point out they do not dispense abortion, or provide it; they dispense information. In doing to they must work around regulations and stay within the law, while certainly operating or providing data within areas where abortion may not be available.

Mind you, the abortion pills are shipped in various ways to people who live where they're not supposed to be sent, sometimes unmarked vans are used, and we see such work-arounds. Hence while the elders of the group are visible, many of the rank and file workers appear and speak here anonymously.

Reviewed by Guy Lodge for Variety. (https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/plan-c-review-1235524927/) He calls this film "urgent and unvarnished" and sees it as the beginning of of a new wave of "post-Roe cinema" following earlier anticipatory films like the French historical films HAppening, present-day portraits like Never Rarely Sometimes Always, and many others that seemed to anticipate the devastating blow that came with Dobbs. Lodge points out Plan C focuses "less on pro-choice ideology" than on the "practicalities of ensuring choice in a system increasingly stacked against the idea." It doesn't bother preaching to the converted nor does it try to convert or argue to opponents or the neutral as a more general film might do. Similarly this film is, as Lodge puts it, "predominantly a present-tense, forward-looking affair," providing a sense of a situation that changes from month to month or even day to day. When Lodge calls this film "unvarnished," he refers partly to the fact that it can be vague about even details of its own specifics, such as omission of how adjacent organizations such as Just the Pill or the Miscarriage and Abortion Hotline are "namedropped" without making clear how they fit into the larger context. There are unnecessary explanatory clips and too many zooms: this isn't the best-made of films.

For this reason Plan C seems hardly mainstream at all but for a narrower but passionately committed audience who want to know more about something they are already involved in and will want a sense of the urgency of the work and its shifting dynamics.

Plan C, 99 mins., debuted at Sundance Janl, 2023, showing also in other US festivals, South by Southwest, Cleveland, Denver (Women+Film), Milwaukee, and Boston (Independent Film Festival). Reviewed here as part of the 2023 San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. Scheduled:
Saturday July 22, 2023
11:30 a.m.
Castro Theatre

[Chris Knipp]

LAURA GABBERT: FOOD AND COUNTRY (2023)

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American food and the pandemic

America's policy of producing cheap food at all costs has long hobbled small independent farmers, ranchers, and chefs. Worried for their survival, trailblazing food writer Ruth Reichl reaches out across political and social divides to uncover the country's broken food system and the innovators risking it all to transform it.

The food problem worsened after World War II when frozen food, canned food, and mass production and distribution flourished and advertising dumbed down American shoppers and kitchens and made Americans happy with the tasteless mass-produced junk the supermarkets provided. Julia Child is presented as the beginning of a counter wave: in the seventies some Americans started looking toward what now is called "slow food" (not mentioned specifically in this film) - organic, local, small production, tomatoes that taste strong and sweet (mentioned).

I enjoyed this documentary because I liked dwelling with it: Ruch Reichl's concern abut the broken American food system, with the rural and small farmers and restauranteurs who care about good food, and the picturesque, historic small towns some of the small local farmers, with their twangy accents, gather around - towns that are withering away as their industrious and better educated kids move to the city for better-paying jobs. And the consolidation of the food supply threatens to end diversity and put it in too few hands.

Just hanging with these simpatico folks is enjoyable. But I don't know whether the film is aware of its torpid pace. Probably not, because it has a problem to focus on, after all: the Coronavirus pandemic. Ruth Reichl carries out many of her Zoom chats with the farmers and distributors or restauranteurs right during the height of the lockdown, when the quality food system, the hands-on farms, the nice restaurants, are trying to figure out how to survive, how not to furlough too many of their workers or not close down altogether. This is stagnation, but also a struggle against it. And we know also they're learning things, though we don't yet know what.

The story is partly a generational one. Waters and Reichl are about the same age and were in California when Ruth went out there from New York and her writing got her hired as LA Times food writer from the mid eighties to the mid nineties. Alice, four years younger, starting as a French culture major at UC Berkeley from New Jersey, with Jeremiah Tower and others opened Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley where they dealt directly with the purveyors and focused on the quality of the food ingredients. Ruch and Alice talk back and forth across the continent shaking their heads abut the double food crisis: the long-term one of the dominance of agribusiness and wiping out of small farms and the short-term one of the pandemic that was speeding up this decline and others like it. But also drastic measures were taken, some response was seen in Congress.

The film blends footage of Congress, of cattle ranchers, of farmland being cleared and fertilized by hundreds of animals, of a Hollywood restaurant redone and an Oakland bakery moved to a new space with its workers weeping with joy and excitement. There is a deal of weeping in this film: and when they weep, it's because stuff matters, and things have gone right. How it all got made is a mystery to me: there must be an alchemy between Reichl and docuemtnary filmmaker Laura Gabbert. In the end its a celebration by Reichl of people she bonded with at a distance, small, organic farmers, specialized distributors, and caring restauranteurs whose independence of the "industrialized model," Reichl says, "frees them to take risks."

The film deepens as it goes. It celebrates circularity: farming families whose younger generation is coming back to take over the work and who are using methods closer to their fathers' grandfathers (at least one is fifth generation) than their fathers. It also ends upbeat, with a farmer who wins a double award for his work; for Minh Phan's new project in LA' Historic Filipinotown, Phenakite, which has been monitored throughout the film, chosen by the LA Times as its restaurant of the year. (Watch her pep talk/coaching message to her servers: they are a model.)

The pandemic did a lot of damage. But out of destruction comes rebirth.

This is Laura Gabbert's sixth documentary; she has done two TV series.

Food and Country, 100 mins., debuted at Sundance Jan. 2023, also showing at Thessaloniki, Austin (SXSW), Cleveland, Minneapolis, Toronto, Seattle and Nantucket. It was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 20-Aug. 6, 2023 San Francisco Jewish Film festival. Scheduled:
July 30
Sunday July 30, 2023
11:30 a.m.
Castro Theatre

429 Castro Street
San Francisco, CA 94103

[Chris Knipp]

MARGARITA LINTON: PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST'S DAUGHTER, OIL ON CANVAS (2022)

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MARGARITA LINTON IN PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST'S DAUGHTER, OIL ON CANVAS

An artist's ego trumps a family tie

This little film lasts barely an hour but encompasses a world of pain. It also contains some of the most heartrendingly sad fake footage - not to recreate events that happened but weren't filmed, but events that were longed for but didn't occur. And they are ingenious and brilliantly deceptive. The film fills one with sadness. Nothing hurts more than being abandoned or ignored by someone close, someone you care about, nothing more frustrating than trying to reconnect with that person when it doesn't happen.

Margarita Linton, known as Rita, is 35. She is a filmmaker. Her estranged father is a Russian-born Israeli painter, Lensky, known for his many obsessive self-portraits. He, or his avatar, says this may seem narcissistic, but is really not: that it's selfless to do them: in returning constantly to his own face, he is erasing it. Really? That is belied by the big name "Lensky" painted across the top of at least one of the paintings - and for that matter, by his finding his affairs more important than seeing his grown daughter.

Rita has a brother, Yossi. They and their mother, both seen in the film, were abandoned by their father years ago and he has a new family and new children. She has not seen him for fifteen years. There is a big retrospective of Lensky's paintings at the Tel Aviv Museum. Rita goes there and films the paintings in the show, including the many self-portraits, and films herself walking among them, filmed as throughout by her husband, Yaniv. It takes a while to read these paintings. They are done in a kind of blobby expressionist style with blurry brush strokes, as if Ensor was losing his eyesight. But some of the portraits are quite nice. However dubious, this is the work of a real artist. She conceives the idea of making a film about her father and staging, in the film, a reunion with him.

Rita begins calling her father. He answers, and seems friendly, asks about her. She tells him how much she likes the exhibition, and that she wants to film it. He is pleased. She wants to get together with him and make that part of the film. But nothing doing. He is too busy now: he has to care for the children; he has to choose the frames for a new exhibition. He puts her off again and again. She seems patient and respectful, and keeps trying, but one senses her growing frustration. Finally it becomes clear how corrosive this experience when Rita declares that while she seems a strong person, she realizes now that she isn't, that she has no sense of self; that a relationship with her father is a big empty hole she's becoming aware of.

Her mother, a big blowsy woman, talks about her relationship with Lensky. She is untroubled with the long-lost connection. She says she knows she never mattered to Rita's father - that family itself doesn't matter to him. Art is what matters to him, not people. It also emerges that in the past when Yossi went back to visit their father, she started not going. And their mother says that their father gave Yossi big, impressive boys as presents and he would only give her little nothings - "a rubber band."

Rita meets with the curator of the exhibition for her father at the TelAviv Museum. His explanation of why no portrait of her is included in it is like a slap in the face. He says the director ordered her portrait to be taken out of the show. The other paintings needed more "breathing room." Ouch. The title of the film, "Portrait of the Artist's Daughter, Oil on Canvas," names a painting that Rita longs for, but does not find.

Now her father relents and sets a meeting between himself and Rita at a noisy cafe to have tea. He has told her to film a bus stop, which she does, and reports on proudly to him. Now he tells her drinking tea will be the perfect image of the meeting of the artist and his daughter. But he stands her up. She persists, and goes to find him at his studio. No answer. Then the meeting finally happens.

Or does it? The ending of this film will surprise you - not all of it, but certainly more than you may have guessed. And the surprise and the invention are what is heartrending. They are a wistful attempt to fill a void than can't be filled, unless it ii filled by the art of this inventive hybrid documentary. A review of the prizewinning film by Hannah Brown in The Jerusalem Post (https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/culture/article-716022) says "it will resonate with anyone who has had a fraught relationship with their parents." She recalls two other films, Gillies MacKinnon's 1998 Hideous Kinky starring Kate Winslet about the daughter of one of Lucian Freud's many mistresses, and Martin Scorsese's 1989 short film "Life Lessons" from New York Stores, about an egocentric artist, as similar themes. But the difference is that this is documentary and autobiographical and the painful experience is only partly digested. Its rawness and simplicity are its power.

Portrait of the Artist's Daughter, Oil on Canvas, 59 mns., debuted May 8, 2022 at Montreal (Hot Docs) and Tel Aviv (May 27, 2022; also a other documentary festivals. It was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 20-Aug. 6, 2023 San Francisco Jewish Film festival. Scheduled:
Thursday July 27, 2023
3:00 p.m.
Vogue Theater
Wednesday August 2, 2023
5:30 p.m.
Piedmont Theatre

[Chris Knipp]

ELON GOLOD: NATHAN-ISM (2023)

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A guard from the Nuremberg Trials makes outsider art about them

Nathan Hilu is a simple, positive, emphatic man. Pay attention, this is important, he says. Listen, this is true. Nathan Hilu was born a Sephardic Jew whose Syrian ancestors were dyers of cloth. (Hilu is an Arabic name; it means "sweet.")

Elon Golod made this little film about what turns out to be an outsider artist who, in his early nineties living in modern-day New York City, obsessively draws, writes, and talks, as he has done for we don't know how many years - the film, dazzled by the strong personality of the man, is vague about some details - about the Nuremberg Trials where for a while at the age of 18, as an Jewish American soldier, he was a guard watching those famous German Nazi prisoners. Books are filled with his Sharpie felt pen drawings tinted and colored with crayons scribbled over with lettering declaring simple facts about the defendants, the trial, his own identity, including his RA army serial number. It says "PFC...CPL...SGT" - does that mean he was promoted from private to sergeant?

Maybe, but later on in the film we finally learn from lengthy research by the expert and patient Lori Berdak Miller at the Saint Louis Military Personal Records Center that he was indeed a guard at Nuremberg - but was no longer on duty there when Goering lengthily kissed his wife goodbye, which he describes as if he saw it. Nathan theorizes that she thus passed the cyanide tablet to Goering with which he, alone among the condemned men, committed suicide and cheated the authorities.

Is it also untrue, as he says, that Nathan befriended the slickest Nuremberg bigwig, Albert Speer, who sweet-talked his way to 20 years at Spandau and a successful post-prison career as a best-selling memoirist of the Third Reich? Nathan says he was a nice man and he gave him paper to write his memoirs on and Speer told him stories. He says they were all nice, even Goering, but ordinary: the Master Race was a sham, "They were no supermen, they' weren't six feet, they weren't blue eyed, they were all little schleppers." Nathan's stories gain credibility, even beauty, from the fact that he is kind to the worst Nazis, that he does not demonize them. He says that they were just bureaucrats. He probably hasn't read Hannah Arendt, but he might have understood her phrase, "the banality of evil." Nathan knows Hitler used anti-Semitism as a tool to galvanize the rest of Europe in his would-be empire.

This is good stuff. It doesn't have to be true. It couldn't entirely be true, even as Nathan Hilu's real experience as an 18-year-old Nuremberg guard became the central experience of his long life. Besides the Saint Louis records researcher, earlier Young Golod interviews other people about Nathan. Present from time to time on screen to confirm the validity of Nathan's experience is Eli Rosenbaum, Counselor for War Crimes Accountability of the US Department of justice. Rosenbaum describes the Nuremberg Trials' enormous importance, the way they "captured the world's imagination," the trial's "remarkable legacy," and how he sees Nathan as a responsible witness there.

An important champion is Laura Kruger, Curator of New York's Hebrew Union College Museum, which has acquired a large collection of Nathan's work and shows some of it in an exhibition of Outsider Art. Looking at outsider art, Kruger says, is like "doing personal archaeology." Art journalist Jeannie Rosenfeld, who has written about it, also hoping to make it better known, or known at all, to the art world, speaks of Nathan's role as artist-storyteller. Directed by Nathan to the Library of Congress - "my stuff is there also, by the way" - Golob films Megan Harris, a Research Specialist of the Veterans History Project, who sees Nathan as repeating his story over and over in pictures as a veteran to "make sense of it" the same way other veterans do in words only. These people value Nathan and his art and his fiercely impatient process of endlessly turning it out, aware he is running out of time.

Plainly, making this work and telling this story of Nuremberg is Nathan's raison d'être, his life-blood, and if he stops he will cease to exist. Indeed that's just what happens. He falters, he grows needy and fearful. He announces he's done doing the drawings and telling the stories. And the next thing we know, he's being given a veteran's national cemetery service and burial, certifying one last time the authenticity that he's always been declaring, that he was a soldier, whatever happened when he came home after the War. In fact before this when Golob gently asks if perhaps he may not have been on duty the whole time at Nuremberg he has a serious meltdown: "You're calling me a liar!" Already we've seen the Saint Louis researcher has found that while he did serve guard duty for the trials, he wasn't there for the last part and for Goering's kiss. We can be glad he din't live to see the finished film that mercilessly shows that and the meltdown itself.

Nathan Hilu lives on the edge between naiveté and sound truth, a fringe where outsider art lives. Nathan is aware of the world of art and his peripheral place in it. He knows there was Michelangelo and Picasso - and Nathan. He is aware of art movements like futurism, impressionism and cubism and he calls his style "Nathan-ism," setting it apart. He is also aware, and this film points out, that the Nazi bigwigs on trial at Nuremberg stole trainloads of art (especially from rich Jewish collectors, not mentioned here) from other parts of Europe to enhance their prestige in Germany.

He says his father wasn't happy with his being an artist and not a businessman and this is why he went off to be a soldier. But did it happen that way? Is that why he signed up in the War? Here's a problem: when earlier someone tried to make a film about Nathan Hilu with thoughts of doing a book, they ran into a roadblock; when interviewed, reports Gustavo Stecher, art book designer, he completely clammed up. The publishers hit a roadblock that they could find no documents to certify that Nathan was there at the trial. In this film he goes on ranting, often interestingly and cogently, but there's not much give and take. He hasn't answered many questions about other aspects of his life. In a way this film becomes as naive and simplistic and obsessive as its subject and mainly supplies admiration, not analysis.

Calan Panchloo captures this simplicity of the film in his review for Film Threat (https://filmthreat.com/reviews/nathan-ism/) when he says Nathan-ism is "an eccentric film in its own right" whose efforts at binding together layers of "history, memory, and personal expression" in an effort to "glean" a "central truth" are "like a child's drawing" that's "interesting but unfocused." It's also true that in addition to not questioning Nathan too deeply because he can't tolerate that it doesn't ever analyze the drawings in any detail.

However this portrait of an old man ranting and scribbling nonetheless does vividly bring alive those momentous trials, that great time of moral reckoning he was once a part of and that he was trying to get our attention about about all those years. Just as Nathan pasted stock photos onto his drawings sometimes, or pulls down the Time/Life books on the War, the film uses clips and recordings of the trials, and it animates the drawings sometimes with the help of Hectah Arias and Héloïse Dorsan Rachet, which helps bring them to life. The cinematography was done by Jason Blevins and Owen Levelle. Golob did the editing himself.

Nathan-ism, 79 mins., debuted Apr. 30, 2023 at Montreal (Hot Docs) and May 12, 2023 Tel Aviv (Docaviv). It was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 20-Aug. 6, 2023 San Francisco Jewish Film festival. Scheduled:
Vogue Theater
Friday July 28, 2023
2:50 p.m.
Vogue Theater
San Francisco, CA 94115

[Chris Knipp]

KASPAR KASICS: ERICA JONG - BREAKING THE WALL (2022)

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ERICA JONG IN ERICA JONG - BREAKING THE WALL

Erica Jong's indulgent self doubt

Erica Jong, celebrated and followed around in this film, is now 80, looking and seeming much younger and still living somewhat insecurely in the shadow of the huge success of her 1973 first novel Fear of Flying with its 12 1/2 million-copy worldwide sales, which made her famous with its celebration of female sexuality and the "zipless fuck."

We get a big dose of her, and part of what doesn't always go down, despite how lively, articulate, and intelligent she is, is something John Updike commented on. Updike's New Yorker essay about her (as well as praise of others, including Henry Miller), is the aura of privilege that surrounds her. "She bounces about on an ubiquitous padding of money," Updike wrote of the novel's protagonist. "At a little remove. . .the story" (of Fear of Flying) "can be viewed as that of a spoiled young woman who after some adventures firmly resolves to go on spoiling herself." If that was true in 1973, it could still be true of the author fifty years later. It's also been commented that there were "moments of breathtaking racism" in the first book, as when Jong titles the Beirut portion of the story "Arabs and other Animals." Simply the throwing around of famous literary names and quotes from Shakespeare in her 1987 Venice novel Shylock's Daughter seems deeply unwise in its implied entitlement.

One big trouble with Kaspar Kasics' film is that it never questions or challenges Jong or catches her out of her comfort zone for a minute. But actually I was perhaps more interested in seeing how Jong lives than in hearing what she says - or even seeing her pushed to justify herself. Partly the film depicts an empty, still New York City during the pandemic lockdown. But she seems deprived of nothing in beautifully decorated Upper East Side apartment, whose handsome, spacious, light-filled and art-filled rooms she shares with her longtime fourth husband "litigator" Ken Burrows.

He is a specialist in that lucrative field of law, divorce. Jong says he is too nice a man for this "killer" field. She has income from all those books. But she also comes from a wealthy family that owned a gifts and home accessories company. There are servants. When she takes yoga it's not a class, but a private teacher. There is an acupuncturist. There is a beautiful house in Connecticut. There are posh, spoiled dogs, and posh, spoiled twin grandchildren who squabble brattily and show off their sophisticated vocabulary. Unfortunately, this takes the edge off Jong's pronouncements and makes them sound more self-satisfied, even when they're smart and tinged with self-doubt. At one point we hear Greta Thunberg making a well-turned speech and by association its generalizations begin to sound too easy, too. After a while it all starts to seem too easy for Jong, even the self-doubt.

Jong is a lively, smart person here. But a little bit of her goes a long way. One can sympathize that after so many books, she is still fearful that she won't get all the writing she wants to done. But it seems a little neurotic, and reflects no obstacles encountered other than interior ones. And in the film, the portrait is private but never intimate, because she and those she's with are always performing self-consciously for the camera.

Despite the comfort and the ego there is self-contradiction in that lingering self doubt. Though she celebrated the free sexuality of women, she never felt safe unless she was married and has married four times (though the fourth has lasted a very long time). The use of the word "fear" in the first book isn't accidental; and long afterward she published Fear of Fifty, ad book she reported on one of her "Charlie Rose" appearances it took her a long time to be able to start. Clearly this is a more genuine fear and more justified now. At the same time this film shows Jong looking and acting very young for her age. And having observed the luxurious circumstances in which she lives, one knows that, though we all suffer tragedy and we all must die, Erica Jong will have those woes as well cushioned off and prepared for as is possible.

A Berliner film blog (https://cinephil.home.blog/films-by-date-seen/2023-2/january-2023/erica-jong-breaking-the-wall/) is harder on Jong than I am. I don't mind her mentioning to a bookstore clerk that she personally knew Kurt Vonnegut, of referring to Susan Sontag and Henry Miller as people she knew. I agree that her advice to young women writers of color seems facile. She is descended from Russian and Polish refugees who fled from pogroms, but that's different. I also agree with "CinePhil" that this film Is "more a portrayal of Jong’s opulent lifestyle" than "a serious intervention in an important debate." (As a fan of Manhattan life I just find the lifestyle more interesting than "CinePhil" does.)

The review is also right in pointing to a weakness in the film - frequently Jong's generalizing is presented as voiceover for images that don't fit it, "inappropriate footage," such as empty Manhattan scenes, which tend to be washed out looking.

This is an interesting woman, whose famous book was certainly a signature of its moment. She is knowledgable, well educated, and savvy (she even got a masters in 18th-century English literature from Columbia). She deserved a film - and a closer, more careful look.

Erica Jong - Breaking the Wall, 90 mins., debuted at Locarno Aug. 7, 2022, also showing in Germany and Switzerland in 2023. It was screened for this review as part of the Jul. 20-Aug. 6, 2023 San Francisco Jewish Film festival. Scheduled:
Tuesday July 25, 2023
12:30 p.m.
Vogue Theater
3290 Sacramento St
San Francisco, CA 94115