Oh boy. The subject matter of this comedy movie is so far beyond the scope of this site. Most of this review is simply me worrying I am going to put my foot in it and desperately trying to avoid that. Kiss Me Kosher is an Israeli comedy about a lesbian and her family, including her holocaust survivor grandmother who is flirting with her Palestinian neighbour. But hey, that’s not the lesbian aspect of the movie, I don’t have to talk about it at all! I’m home free! What’s that? The lesbian relationship is between a Jewish Israeli woman and German woman whose grandparents might have been Nazis? Oh boy, here we go.
Shira is a trendy, leftist lesbian hipster. Despite this, she maintains a close relationship with her grandmother, Berta. When Shira tells Berta that she thinks her new girlfriend, Maria is The One, grandma scoffs and thinks this is just another one of commitment-phobic Shira’s flings. Especially because Maria is not Jewish. In fact, Maria is German. While visiting Israel to meet Shira’s family, Maria impulsively proposes. Several conflicts arise from this cross-cultural relationship and biases are brought to the surface. Berta too is dealing with a similar issue. She is secretly seeing her Palestinian neighbour, but won’t go public with her relationship with an Arab man.
The problem with me reviewing this is that outside of being a lesbian, the rest of these identities are not ones I inhabit. And the comedy made about these identities is pretty edgy in a way I don’t feel equipped to discuss. What I will say is that Kiss Me Kosher uses comedy for confrontational and pointed observations. This is a film that wants to explore the bigotry of every single character. Shira is probably the closest thing to a conduit for the filmmaker’s views. Though even she has both biases and character flaws outside of this tense, international relations incident writ small in her romance. Kiss Me Kosher also avoids offering overt solutions to any of these issues. It offers observation and maybe critique but knows better than to offer some sort of hokey solution to issues that go far beyond the scope of a single comedy film.
Okay, lesbian stuff. I can talk about that. How’s the lesbian stuff in Kiss Me Kosher? It’s fine. Shira spends most of the movie claiming that Maria is different than her previous partners. But for much of the movie, this doesn’t come across. Why do these two women in a three month relationship work so hard to commit themselves to one another? Though at the end of the day, that is what makes Maria different. For whatever reason, Shira wants to fight to be with her, even when things get way harder than they’ve been with her past partners. The movie never “solves” the problem of Shira and Maria’s let’s say, conflicting family histories. It just shows two individuals in the present who have made the choice to live beyond those pasts.
Hold everything. John Carroll lynch is in this? Why the fuck is John Carol lynch in this? This might be the new winner of weirdest surprise person involved with a WLW movie. Lynch’s character is the most bigoted. While most of the characters have levels and layers, his is more of the unpleasant boomer who has little to offer beyond aggression and hot takes. I do think this character is a bit of a cop-out. Everyone else seems reasonable when you get ignorant American John Carroll Lynch doing overt racism and opining on how military might is the only way to achieve peace.
There’s certainly an audacity to Kiss Me Kosher. It takes on some very controversial topics head-on. Of course, they’re so controversial that I didn’t find it funny. That’s sort of what it comes down to here. If someone asked me to recommend them a lesbian comedy movie, I would never recommend them Kiss Me Kosher. With everything that’s happening right now it’s not exactly the time for a movie such as this. But as has become apparent to me, it is never gonna be the time for this. And I fear that Kiss Me Kosher only gets less funny as time goes on. There are so many external factors that make this an impossible movie to look at objectively (whatever that means), let alone rate. Here’s a rating anyway, as wish washy as the rest of this review
Overall rating: 5.0/10
Other WLW films in similar genres
Cross-cultural romance
Gays and Grandmas