Avi Nesher’s coming-of-age film, The Matchmaker, brims with the yearning for romance and love, the pain and loss of the Holocaust and the wonderment of adolescence.
Adir Miller, right, and Tuval Shafir in The Matchmaker.
These deep-seated, roiling human emotions play out in the Israeli port city of Haifa in the summer of 1968, when Arik (Tuval Shafir), a 16-year-old curious teen, finds a job with Yankele Bride (Adir Miller), a reclusive matchmaker and Holocaust survivor.
Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, The Matchmaker opens as Hezbollah rockets rain down on Haifa during the tumult of the Second Lebanon War in 2006.
As the jagged blare of an ambulance siren fills the air, Arik learns he has come into a substantial inheritance from the man who once employed him.
The film then flashes back 38 years, to the time Arik procured potential clients for Yankele, a mysterious, persistent and kind-hearted matchmaker and occasional smuggler who works out of a bakery near the seedy waterfront and whose mission in life is to match up lonely souls.
Dedicated to matching up people who seek “real love” as opposed to “hanky-panky,” Yankele recruits Arik after he and his naughty friends try to deceive him in a juvenile practical joke. Their deception leads Yankele to Arik’s father, an old, lost friend from prewar Romania.
Plunging into his work with zeal, determination and curiosity, Arik discovers a world far removed from his own experiences as he meets an assortment of unusual characters.
They include Clara (Maya Dagan), an attractive but fragile Holocaust survivor whom Yankele desires and who runs an illegal gambling den in her apartment; Sylvia (Bat-El Papura), the owner of a movie theatre who was subjected to Nazi medical experiments and who now hungers for a husband, and Meir (Dror Kenen), a socially awkward librarian who also has an eye on Clara.
Not surprisingly, Arik is hardly immune to the call of love. He falls for Tamara (Neta Porat), a demure young woman who looks especially striking in a bathing suit.
Boldly imaginative in conception and execution, The Matchmaker largely unfolds in what Yankele accurately describes as Haifa’s “low-rent” district, a somewhat shabby, but colourful, neighbourhood dotted with bars and theatres and inhabited by new Jewish immigrants, Israeli Arabs and prostitutes.
Nesher, an able director who has a knack for creating a mood of plausibility in his movies, extracts credible performances from the cast.
Miller projects an air of mystery, while Dagan exudes personal tragedy. Papura radiates sadness and desperation and Kenen emits both vulnerability and calculation.
Shafir, who carries much of the film on his young shoulders, turns in a remarkably mature performance.
The Matchmaker, which is 118 minutes in length, is a fine, sensitively made film about broken people from the old world trying to mend themselves in a new land.
