Don't worry about me. No, really. I'll just sit here in the dark, watching "young independent Jewish filmmakers look at Grandma,"a collection of three shorts now screening at Yerba Buena. All three together take just over an hour to show, so after that I'll change the light bulb.
Director Andy Abrahams Wilson with "Bubbeh" in Wilson's Bubbeh Lee & Me.
Details
Wednesday, Nov. 29, at 8 p.m. Tickets are $5-6; call 978-2787.
Related Content
More About
Obscure and specialized as this subject sounds, it is my contention that everyone has a Grandma story, and many of them will be familiar in these films. Two take the form of hand-held interviews with the elder stateswoman, conducted and filmed by their loving, simpering grandsons (Andy Abrahams Wilson's 1996 Bubbeh Lee & Me and Sandi Dubowsky's 1993 Tomboychik); the third is a fictionalized short in Hebrew (and some Polish) with English subtitles, Babcha, by Micky Zilbershtein.
Bubbeh Lee (bubbeh means "grandmother" in Yiddish), ensconced in her West Palm Beach retirement community, proclaims herself "aggressive" and proves it by buying and then returning groceries, pushing her way through the Employees Only doors to demand help. All the tropes of grandmahood are here (as they are in all three films): the closet full of wigs, the flowered shirts, the sandals with toe socks, the huge purse, the coupons for 73 cents, the bad hearing. But the 87-year-old Lee Abrahams defies convention. She's honest about her loveless childhood and the love she withheld from her beloved, deceased husband; she gives Andy grief about being gay but resigns herself to his lack of marriageability.
In Bubbeh Lee, as in Tomboychik, the filmmaker/narrator is the weak point. Wilson and Dubowsky -- both gay men struggling with this powerful female icon -- giggle and preen their way through the interviews. The only powerful point in Tomboychikcomes when Malverna, Sandi's slightly meshuggeneh grandmother, confides, "You'd be beautiful as a girl." The irony is overplayed, however, when Dubowsky replays the scene at the end, with his less-than-insightful commentary. The 88-year-old Malverna is a fascinating character -- she claims to have been "one of the boys," having "fought like a boy, jumped like a boy" -- but Dubowsky never explores her possible lesbianism (or early feminism).
Babcha is the surprise standout. Running just 15 minutes, Zilbershtein's 1998 film is the only one of the three with genuine production values -- it could easily run twice as long. In it, Dror is a cocky, smart-mouthed copywriter who "oldie sits" his wacky grandmother, "the camp babe" (aka Holocaust survivor) of his family. When he meets shiksa hottie Yael, his way of telling her "something serious" about himself is to take her to meet Babcha (like bubbeh, but Polish). Though he calls Babcha a "fruitcake," Dror shows her immense respect.
Why should any goy go to see these films? For one, the Jewishness is downplayed; only Bubbeh Lee talks about it much, and there's little Yiddish to translate. (Hell, if you can figure out those Noah's Bagels ads, you'll have no trouble here.) More important, they explore issues of mortality and identity -- key issues in the age of AIDS -- in a way that's touching without being maudlin. Besides, by going you can make up for the fact that you never call and you never write.
