(courtesy IMDb)
There is one line towards the end of this singularly charming but emotionally meaningful film with which anyone who has ever grown up in an oppressive environment where they cannot be themselves will readily identify.
The titular protagonist of The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch (Wolkenbruchs wunderliche Reise in die Arme einer Schickse), Mordechai ‘Motti’ Wolkenbruch (Joel Basman) has, after pretty much everything in his life has imploded, gone to see his dying insurance client, Frau Silberzweig (Sunnyi Melles), with whom he has been receiving some fairly under-the-table, for a good Jewish boy at least, Tarot card guidance.
He is horrified to see how much Frau Silberzweig has declined, but she is remarkably composed about her imminent demise, joking about whether the flowers that Motti has brought will expire before she does or if she’ll beat them to it.
As they talk, Motti confesses that his life has changed, as predicted by the cards, beyond all recognition, and he wonders, in considerable despair, what there is left for him.
Rather sagely, and with an unmistakable delight, delivered though it is with a rasping voice and a terminal breathlessness, Frau Silberzweig says that if everything he once know has gone, that there is now room for him to experience everything.
Motti startles but then you see the recognition hit him, the same way it does for anyone who has left their old life behind them and walked into an unknown land of new life experiences that they don’t recognise and cannot easily navigate, as he suddenly understands, or begins to, anyway, that yes, somethings have ended but so many others are about to begin.
For a scene played out on the imminent eve of someone’s death, it’s a freeing scene, one that goes to the heart of 2018’s The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch is all about – that being brave enough to loose your existential shackles and live your truth may be terrifying and may initially leave you feeling catastrophically bereft, that there is a greater freedom and joy that awaits.
It’s an intoxicating realisation and one this reviewer experience when after 37 years of uncomfortably shoehorning himself to fit into a very tight and narrow heteronormative Church world, he said goodbye to all of it, leaving his Christian upbringing and all the strictures that came with it, and embracing the reality that he was, and yes, is, a very gay man.
Like Motti, I was scared sh*tless at first, excited to have taken the huge step that I had but utterly unsure about what to do with it, but then I realised that here was life for me to remake as I wanted it to be, as I WAS and not as people told me it should be.
Motti is in a similar situation, finally free from the stultifying weight of his controlling mother Judith (Inge Maux)’s expectations and actions, who had devoted her life to exhaustingly strict observances of traditional Jewish belief, but staring at a blank canvas now shorn of all its nascent promise of a relationship with a shiksa or non-Jewish girl, which is what served as the catalyst for his long overdue rebellion.
The girl in question is Laura (Noémie Schmidt), a fellow university student, with whom Motti is almost instantly smitten when he sees her walk into one of his economics lectures one day.
She is the girl he can’t have, won’t have if his Judith were to ever find out about her, but Motti finds her irresistible and he embarks on a relationship with her even as he goes on the shidduchs or arranged dates where Orthodox Jewish families supervise the courtship of their children with an eye to eventual marriage.
Like everything in Motti’s life, its rigorously controlled and policed, and the only light for him at the end of a very dark tunnel comes when he is introduced to Mechal (Noémie Schmidt) who is similarly unhappy about her endless arranged dates and who welcomes the idea of Motti and her pretending to date as a cover for his ongoing relationship with Laura.
What follows then in The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch, based on Swiss author Thomas Meyer’s debut novel Wolkenbruch’s Wondrous Journey into the Arms of a Shiksa, is best left to the watching of a film that happily embraces high drama and rom-com hilarity in equal measure, but suffice to say it speaks volumes about the power of the truth, and specifically its living, to set you free.
There’s nothing wrong with traditions, especially those of a religious nature, and people like Motti’s Judith and his brothers are perfectly happy in their observant lives; but traditions can also become a prison or a noose for certain people who, like Motti, find the very rituals that one person finds comforting and meaningful, far too onerous to bear.
Watching as Motti slowly comes alive to the power of saying “NO”, first subversively then openly, is quietly but powerfully exhilarating, his ascent into a life all his own also brave enough to embrace the fact that there is a painful disruption that runs alongside all that enlivening liberation.
In fact, at the point where Motti and his mother have a fairly seismic confrontation and things happen, Motti collapses into the enveloping arms of his far more understanding father Moishe (Udo Samel), with whom he is quite close, and breaks down, all too aware that his much-sought freedom comes with a painful emotional cost.
It’s a touching moment that underscores that you don’t go off into your new life without some painful consequences but The Awakening of Motti Wolkenbruch is careful to remind you that there is not the end of the story, not even close to it.
As Frau Silberzweig sagely observed, what looks to be an end and feels diabolically like one is far from it, and is, in fact, a beginning, an exciting step into the unknown where anything might happen, something the film’s touchingly enigmatic ending embraces with gusto as a number of closing events suggest life could go anywhere and isn’t that the thrill of it?