WELL AND TRULY PICKLED!
There’s plenty to relish as comedy star Seth Rogen falls into a vat of gherkins and comes back to life 100 years later
An American Pickle (In cinemas, 12A)
Verdict: Sweet and sour ★★★✩✩
Young Ahmed (Curzon Home Cinema)
Verdict: Powerful and timely ★★★✩✩
Papicha (VOD platforms)
Verdict: An auspicious debut ★★★★✩
THE comic premise of the innocent abroad has a long cinematic heritage and comes in many forms: Woody Allen in Sleeper, Peter Sellers in Being There, Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee... all found themselves plunged into an unfamiliar society in which, whether by accident or design, their ‘otherness’ helped them to thrive.
In An American Pickle it’s the turn of Seth Rogen’s Herschel Greenbaum, a pious Jew from the fictional Eastern European town of Schlupsk, who in 1920, with his wife Sarah (Sarah Snook), emigrates to America to escape the twin horrors of extreme poverty and violent anti-Semitism.
For Herschel, the American dream is a menial job in a Brooklyn pickle factory, where one day he has a terrible accident, toppling unseen into an enormous vat of pickles. Soon afterwards, the factory is shut down and falls into disuse. But Herschel is perfectly preserved by the pickle juice and emerges, alive and un-aged, exactly a century later.
After the media interest dies down (when I pointed out that the news frenzy was improbably brief, my wife rightly noted that this is not exactly a plot worth picking holes in), Herschel goes to live with his only surviving relative, great-grandson Ben Greenbaum (also played by Rogen).
Naturally, he is bemused by the myriad mysteries of 21st-century New York City, but also upset by the lapse of Ben’s faith and his failure, as Herschel sees it, to honour the memory of his forebears.
The two fall out, but not before Herschel has set up his own pickle business, wheeling a barrow converted from a supermarket trolley through Brooklyn and becoming an Instagram sensation.
Eventually, after several misadventures, including a deportation by the U.S. authorities back to
Schlupsk, the story reaches a resolution that, it’s no spoiler to reveal, is more sweet than sour.
Some of this is very funny, as long as you’re happy to see Rogen jerking — or perhaps in this case gherkin — around. When Simon Rich’s screenplay, adapted from his own 2013 short story, eventually runs out of comedic puff, he, director Brandon Trost and Rogen do their collective best to give us a poignant meditation on faith and family that, at times, feels a teeny bit strained.
It’s disappointing, too, to see so little of Snook, such a beguiling actress and so brilliant as the conniving Siobhan Roy in the TV drama Succession.
Nevertheless, An American Pickle has charm, zest and a running time of under 90 minutes — a solid trio of virtues.
RELIGION looms just as large, but in a strikingly different way, in two foreign-language films I first saw last year in Cannes, which are now being released on video-ondemand platforms.
Young Ahmed is a low-key but timely and powerful Belgian film about a 13-year-old Muslim boy from a decent family who is converted into a potentially deadly jihadist by an imam, who persuades him that his kindly Arabic teacher is an apostate, an infidel.
When Ahmed duly attacks her, he is carted off to a juvenile detention centre and given psychiatric treatment.
Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi) is heartbreakingly impressionable and vulnerable and, with lots of hormones pinging around, just the wrong age to be radicalised.
His nice mother is beside herself; just a month earlier he was playing video games, now he’s raging about heretics.
Yet when he is packed off to work at a farm, he must balance his new fundamentalism with the inconvenient fact that he really fancies a girl he meets there.
WRITTEN and directed by brothers Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne, Young Ahmed is a compassionate study not just of a problem in Western Europe but of a child as he reaches adolescence. It’s a coming-of-age story with a difference and well worth seeing.
PAPICHA, a French and Arabiclanguage film set in Algeria during the civil war there in the 1990s, covers broadly similar ground.
The terrific Lyna Khoudri (soon to be seen in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch) plays Nedjma, a fashion student with no time for the strictures of orthodox Islam. She likes to wear jeans and lipstick but this throws her into conflict even with some of her friends. Then she has an idea: she will stage a fashion show with the traditional North African women’s garment, the ‘haik’, as its centrepiece.
Really, this is a story about spirited female camaraderie in a country where men make the laws. It’s a highly impressive first feature for writer-director Mounia Meddour. I admired it greatly.