The Matchmaker

There's a strange figure limping around Haifa in the summer of 1968. Yankele Bride, scarred of face but benign of manner, approaches strangers to ask if they're looking for love. Teenage Arik plays an adolescent joke on this newly-arrived matchmaker the first time they meet. But Arik doesn't yet foresee how intertwined his life will become with Yankele's. Harnessing the boy's love of detective stories, Yankele hires Arik to spy on potential mates for his clients. On the job down in Haifa's lower city, Arik meets a Felliniesque cast of characters. Chief among them is Sylvia, a big-hearted dwarf and the proprietress of a popular cinema. There's also an oddball librarian who fans the flames of Arik's new preference for “Stalag fiction,” trashy stuff about Jewish girls in Nazi prisons. Also on Arik's mind is a sexy American girl who arrives in town for the summer, distracting him from his surveillance work. Meanwhile, the neighbors are suspicious of Holocaust survivors like Yankele-it's whispered he must have done bad things if he managed to survive. THE MATCHMAKER is a bittersweet coming-of-age story, a meditation on Israel's past and its future. (In Hebrew with subtitles) – B.B.