Movie Review	Movie Reviews Archive

Kissing Jessica Stein
Written by Heather Juergensen and Jennifer Westfeldt (from their stage play)
Directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld
starring Tolvah Feldshuh
How to order

For several years now it looked as though American films­ both Hollywood and independent­ about queerness had no original place to go. The litany of second-rate gay or lesbian themes movies grew longer with each month's list of new films. The low point of Kiss Me Guido seemed eminently sustainable. At some point anything new would be a relief from the cascade of romantic genre comedies that were being released.

On the face of it Kissing Jessica Stein looked like it might break the mold. While appearing at first yet another coming-out and falling-in-love story, the film actually lets that trope take a back seat to the somewhat more interesting look at what it is like to come-out and fall in love in the context of a Jewish family. Written by Heather Juergensen and Jennifer Westfeldt (from their stage play) and directed by Charles Herman-Wurmfeld, it tells the story of a professional, bright, attractive woman who has everything going for her but finding a boyfriend. As fate would have it, she notices a "women looking for women" personal ad and, surprise, meets a professional, bright, attractive woman who was also looking. As you might imagine, complications ensue.

View our poll archive

What is engaging about Kissing Jessica Stein is not its lesbians-meet-and-have-problems theme, but how this interacts with the film's Jewish subtexts of family, community, and relationships. When it is at its best­ such as Tovah Feldshuh's performance as Jessica's complicated, engaging mother­ the film transcends the easy jokes about "Jewish mothers" and all of the junky cultural baggage that goes with that. Indeed, it seems to be making smart, witty points that cross community boundaries.

The same thing was true in the opening scenes of the execrable Kiss Me Guido, where we see how working-class Italian men act in the Bronx­ setting at café tables, wearing gold chains, and chatting and gossiping­ and then seeing a similar cultural phenomenon with gay men in Greenwich Village. While witty, it also allowed us to see why the title character might be unaware that his new roommate was a queen. The moments when Kissing Jessica Stein comes close to that are sharp and entertaining. Unfortunately, all too often, the film ends up recycling New York and Jewish (is that redundant in Hollywood movies?) clichés that we've seen all too often in Woody Allen movies and "Sex and the City." In the end, whatever seemed fresh about the film, simply feels niche-marketed. In fact, the film was premiered at several Jewish film festivals­ the same sign of cultural entrenchment and stagnation that gay-and-lesbian festivals have evidenced over the years.

This is too bad because there is a good movie­ many good movies­ to be made that would expand our ideas about queerness. How are Jews and queers both outsiders? What does this mean? How does it play out? This is the sort of material that Gus Van Sant did so well in his first film Mala Notch, where he examined the overlapping connections and contradictions of race, social position, sexual identity, and age when a young white guy befriends Latino street youths in Portland, Oregon. This is a film that couldn't get play at the gay festivals 15 years ago, and certainly wouldn't get much at Latino festivals either. The power of the film came from the fact that Van Sant was not wedding to the idea of sexual­ or even racial­ identity defining his characters or their actions. In Kissing Jessica Stein, both the queerness and the Jewishness have become prepackaged, easily understood commodities that are marketed to distinct and easily identified audiences, and as enjoyable as some of it is, it ends up feeling stale.

The is not true of Esther Kahn, directed by Arnaud Desplechin and Emmanuel Bourdieu. While the film is not gay or lesbian­ in any usual sense­ it actually speaks to a more profound sense of queerness that most other films. And it certainly is Jewish. Set in London at the end of the last century, it tells the story of Esther Kahn, a young Jewish woman from a family of tailors who decides that she wants to become an actress. Esther is not simply a loner, she seems to exist in an interior space that sets her apart from everyone else in the world. She sees­ experiences­ her desire to be on the stage as a form of self-protection crossed with personal and spiritual salvation. Esther's outsider status­ reinforced in the film by her religion and her poverty­ is celebrated as her liberation even as it is presented as her eternal hardship.

What is amazing about the film­ beautifully photographed in a series of seemingly incidental and elliptical scenes­ is that it captures perfectly the incredible plight and glory of being the outsider. When Esther finally becomes a success on the stage the effect is less A Star is Born than a glorification of the alien and the cultural stranger. Kissing Jessica Stein might have been a better­ smarter and more complex­ film if it understood the world as Esther Kahn does.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com