Between the Temples

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES   ***

Nathan Silver

2024

IDEA:  Amid personal and professional crisis, a cantor reluctantly agrees to give his former grade-school music teacher a late-in-life bat mitzvah. 

BLURB:  Between the Temples is a film of deliberately discordant tones and abrasive affect that is, at heart, a warm character study of two bereft individuals finding renewed purpose through each other. Which is another way of saying that the film exists between modes of filmmaking - acrid contemporary cringe comedy and relatively crowd-pleasing New Hollywood - just as its characters find themselves caught between traditional notions of Judaism and far less orthodox ones. The conservative and more adventurous (reform?) dimensions of Between the Temples come together in electric and productively awkward conversation, creating a volatile energy that feels at once old and new. While Silver’s 16mm cinematography and iris shots evoke the past, his penchant for fast, arrhythmic editing, handheld camerawork, and a cacophonous soundscape of quotidian noises amped up to 11 align him with the vérité working-class chaos of the Safdie brothers. Extreme closeups predominate, compounding the claustrophobia of the always discomfiting social situations Jason Schwartzman’s Ben has a habit of finding himself in. The film’s antsy, febrile atmosphere is enhanced by the terrific cast, especially Carol Kane, whose presence is so potently batty it has the effect of shifting the climate of any scene she enters. Her looniness is the perfect foil and complement to Schwartzman’s nebbishy sullenness; where their relationship ends up is Between the Temples’ final and most satisfying rejection of orthodoxy.