Review - Jüdische Allgemeine Zeitung, Berlin
Feature films from Britain with Jewish subjects and characters are a scarce commodity compared to America or France in spite of the large British Jewish community. Even more rarely do they find their way into German movie theaters, as did the wonderful satire Leon the Pigfarmer. However this year's festival of British independent film Britspotting, seems to herald a new trend, bringing Me Without You, Paradise Grove and the documentary Settlers.
Charles Harris's Paradise Grove takes place in a Jewish age home. Keith is nineteen years old and lives and works in the old age home run by his mother. She has been long separated from Keith's black father and is in the middle of an affair with a doctor, who hankers after a somewhat more binding relationship. And then there is Izzie, her father and Keith's grandfather, who retailed high-value lingerie when he was younger and is still keen to have the latest catalogues read to him.
Neither mother nor grandfather understand Keith's complete lack of ambition. He never leaves the home, and his sole hobby is learning Hebrew. But all this starts to change when an attractive new care assistant is taken on. It will be for her that he has himself "trimmed" and it's with her that he will ultimately leave the home.
But before he can, he must take leave of grandfather Izzie, who in the meantime has been confined to a wheelchair by a stroke and who had wanted to end his life even before this, finding no dignity in decay.
Izzie is performed by the magnificent Ron Moody, who effortlessly acts everyone off the screen.
Typically English is the macabre humour with which the film treats the subjects of age and death. Here the film takes us sometimes right to the very pain threshold of laughter. At the same time we come to love the inhabitants of the home, many of whom are incidentally played by non-professionals.
Jessica Jacoby
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