With attitudes towards the status, even the desirability, of marriage becoming increasingly relaxed, it comes as a shock to be plunged into this Israeli drama predicated on matrimony maintaining ancient and terrifying powers.
Zaza is approaching the ripe old age of 32, and his doting parents are visibly unravelling with the worry of him remaining a bachelor boy.
While not insisting on the uncertainties of a fully arranged marriage, where the bride appears sight unseen, Yasha and Lily have enrolled their easygoing son on a crash course of meeting potential wives, carefully selected by them on an unbending set of time-honoured criteria. Zaza's failure to rise to the bait, it quickly transpires, is due to the fact that his heart already belongs to another.
Unfortunately for Zaza, the other is Judith, a strong-willed and hugely attractive lady who is older than Zaza, divorced, and in possession of a six-year-old daughter, any one of which would automatically disqualify her in the marriage stakes. The fact that the pair are clearly besotted with each other and eminently compatible, graphically illustrated in a sinful sex scene, has no relevance in this tightly structured world.
When Zaza clumsily engineers a meeting between his beloved and his family - his entire family, at that - the consequences are predictably disastrous. The love which sustains doting parents is revealed to have a furious and implacable twin. Zaza, a man who is dependent on charm and a credit card supplied by his parents, reels under the ferocity of an onslaught which he should have seen coming. Observance of strict social codes is not optional.
Late Marriage is the first film from writer-director Dover Koshashvili, and it is immensely promising. The cast performs with a natural conviction, and the mood swings from euphoria to despair without once taking a detour into melodrama; this is an object lesson in the tragi-comic nature of good intentions.
The final scene, which I shall not reveal details of here, is a particular treat for connoisseurs of the enjoyably unsettling, carrying echoes of such masterpieces of nervous seatshifting as Festen.
Late Marriage
Cert: NC
