'Kiss Me Kosher' tells a comic story of an Israeli-German couple - film review

• Published date: 20 April 2024
• Author: HANNAH BROWN
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

It's a typically irreverent joke in a movie that is a mixture of a rom-com and a more serious look at how Israelis deal with prejudice and the past, which is now playing in theaters across North America, with a simultaneous release on video-on-demand and digital platforms including Apple TV, Amazon, ChaiFlicks, and many others, and many cable providers

It's one of those stories about how a young couple in love finds their lives complicated when they get serious and their extended families become involved. It brought to mind the recent Julia Roberts-George Clooney movie, Ticket to Paradise, about parents who try to break up their daughter's relationship with her Balinese fiancé.

But Kiss Me Kosher, written and directed by Shirel Peleg, focuses on a romance between Shira (Moran Rosenblatt of Fauda and We Were the Lucky Ones), an Israeli woman who runs a bar in south Tel Aviv, and Maria (Luise Wolfram, who was in Mathilde and Das Boot), a German botanist.

The plot of the movie

Shira's bar is called The Jewish Princess, which is owned by her formidable Holocaust survivor grandmother (Rivka Michaeli, who somehow manages to become more fun to watch every year), whose portrait, under the words, "The Real Jewish Princess," overlooks the entire venue.

Shira is a free spirit who has had many lovers, and she's the rebellious daughter of an American father (John Carroll Lynch, whom you have seen in dozens of movies and series, notably as Frances McDormand's husband in Fargo) who has moved his family to a West Bank settlement out of political conviction, and a mother (Irit Kaplan of The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem) who is much more interested in planning Shira's wedding than in politics.

The story gets going when Maria moves in with Shira, and through a set of rom-com complications, proposes without exactly meaning to. Suddenly, Shira's mother and girlfriends are pushing for a huge wedding that Shira and especially Maria aren't sure they want.

Shira's grandmother, who is having a late-life romance with her Arab doctor neighbor (Salim Daw of Avanti Popolo and The Crown), is dead set against Shira marrying a German, telling her granddaughter: "You're looking for my bloodiest wound to rub salt into it." Shira responds, "Sorry for thinking that the person who's in love with an Arab wouldn't have a problem with my German!"

That's typical of some of the dialogue in the movie, which tends to be a bit on the nose, although not necessarily unrealistic, and as Kiss Me Kosher...