In Nathan Silver’s divinely disordered screwball “Between the Temples,” Jason Schwartzman plays a grieving cantor who, after the death of his wife, can’t sing anymore but who finds a strange kinship with a much older widow seeking her bat mitzvah. Yes, that old story. But even that brief synopsis doesn’t really begin to hint at the singularity – or the delight – of “Between the Temples.
” The movie’s grammar – 16mm, improvisational, shot purposeful erratically by Sean Price Williams – is just as antic as its story. In this winningly chaotic comedy, you can almost feel the characters and filmmakers, as one, resisting order and pushing back against convention. That makes for an experience as volatile and hilarious as it is sweet and profound.
That’s particularly due to Schwartzman and Kane who, as a pair with some echoes of Bud Cort and Ruth Gordon in “Harold and Maude,” make for the best canter-elderly bat mitzvah student duo you’ve ever seen, or, more simply, the most memorable on-screen duo of the year. This is Silver’s ninth feature and possibly his finest. “Between the Temples,” playful, loose and dead set against any moment coming off as too polished or rehearsed, is always very close to falling into shambles.
Or maybe it does, perpetually, but has the spirit, or foolhardiness, to keep going. With disaster ever present, “Between the Temples” ambles its way toward a scruffy, endearing magic of its own. Ben Gottlieb works at a synago.