On his first visit to the United States in 1987, German director Jan Schutte discovered Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach and its mother lode of melancholy Russian and German émigrés.
It was also where he was introduced to Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short stories, and became enamored of the writer’s bittersweet evocation of the immigrant experience, and an America of abiding mystery as well as opportunity.
Two decades later, Schutte has realized a long-held dream with the release of “Love Comes Lately,” his interlocking film adaptation of three Singer stories. An unsentimental portrayal of an aging writer’s prosaic and imaginary love life, it unfolds somewhere between the ’50s and today. “America is a new world, but in many ways it’s very old-fashioned,” Schutte says.
“Love Comes Lately,” which was the centerpiece program at the recent San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, opens Friday, Aug. 22, at the Opera Plaza Cinema in San Francisco. It stars Otto Tausig, Barbara Hershey, Rhea Perlman, Tovah Feldshuh and Elizabeth Peña.
A tall, handsome fellow in his early 50s with a shock of gray hair, Schutte speaks fluent English thanks, in part, to teaching stints at Harvard and Dartmouth.
Part of the generation of Germans that was taught the Holocaust in school, Schutte began to see the genocide from a different angle when he began traveling and meeting Jews.
“What I started to understand was that the crime was also a loss for Germany,” Schutte said during a July interview in a hotel coffee shop.
He recounts an anecdote about Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, an Austrian who came to the U.S. to study. Kandel returned to Vienna after the war, and eagerly attended the opera.
“I can’t explain, it’s very much like it was when I was a young boy, but something’s missing,” he said to his wife. “No Jews,” she replied.
“This is like a joke,” Schutte says, “but there’s something in it.” Schutte was inspired to try to understand what Germany was like before the war, when a large number of its Jews were not only completely assimilated, but part of the cultural elite.
“If you would have asked somebody in 1920 which country would do this Holocaust to the Jewish population, nobody would have guessed Germany,” he declares. “Maybe Austria, or France or Spain.”
“Love Comes Lately” is a kind of bookend to Schutte’s 1994 success, “Bye Bye America,” about three Polish immigrants who cash in their New York chips to return to their native land.
Schutte is drawn to characters in limbo between their homeland and their adopted country, as well as between reality and the life of the mind. In that light, his connection with I.B. Singer’s stories makes perfect sense.
“There’s one very beautiful one, ‘A Wedding in Brownsville,’ and at the end he’s in a blur, the main character,” Schutte says. “He doesn’t even know, is this reality, a dream, am I dead, what is happening?”
The filmmaker elaborates, “When Singer first came to America, he went to cafeterias, and he was always waiting for the waiter. No waiters served him. He said it was like a dream. ‘Sitting in a cafeteria full of waiters, but nobody helps me. Maybe I’m dead.’ And that’s what I wanted to achieve with the film, as well. At the end you don’t know, is he on the train? Is this a dream?”
“Love Comes Lately” opens Friday, Aug. 22, at the Opera Plaza Cinema, 601 Van Ness Ave., S.F.