The British comedy “The Infidel” will not wipe out whatever suspicions and tensions exist between Jews and Muslims in the West. But it’s a welcome relief to spend 105 minutes laughing about them.
David Baddiel’s broad, generally affectionate screenplay suggests, without moralizing, that the distance between Semites is much smaller than commonly assumed. Naively optimistic? Perhaps. Fertile ground for Borscht Belt humor? Absolutely.
“The Infidel” screens at 7:30 p.m. Feb. 9 in the Mostly British Film Festival at the Vogue Theater. The comedy, which received a very limited U.S. theatrical release, is co-presented by the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. It also plays 4:30 p.m. March 10 at CineArts in Pleasant Hill as part of the East Bay International Jewish Film Festival.
The titular “infidel,” Mahmud, is a bald, boisterous, British-born father and husband. An observant but fully assimilated Muslim, he’s more of a soccer fan than a God buff. Mahmud’s main concern, when he can be bothered to think about it, is one of appearances: The soon-to-be stepfather of the girl his son wants to marry is an ultraconservative cleric. Mahmud will have to pretend to be a dignified, religious person for at least the duration of one face-to-face meeting to get him to consent to the wedding.
The prospect of this little scam both fades and grows in importance when Mahmud finds papers indicating he was adopted as a small child. He assumes his birth mother was a Muslim like his adoptive parents, but he’s in for a seismic shock: His real name is Solly Shimshillewitz.
On one hand, putting on a devout Muslim persona for an hour is child’s play compared to hiding the truth about his Jewish identity for all time — or coming out as a Jew and blowing up his life as he knows it. On the other hand, proceeding with the fakeout of the cleric suddenly makes the stakes even greater.
Mahmud can’t confide in his family or co-workers, obviously, so he turns to Lenny Goldberg (Richard Schiff of “The West Wing”), a cynical, divorced American Jew who lives across the street. The first steps are Mahmud’s acceptance and embrace of his inner Solly in an endearing Pygmalionesque relationship that progresses (thankfully) from nose jokes to developing a Jewish shrug to perfecting Jewish dance steps to — am I giving anything away? — genuine friendship (though not without the requisite ups and downs along the way).
“The Infidel,” it goes without saying, trades in political incorrectness that some will find occasionally offensive and others will wish went deeper and further into scathing bad taste. But its goal, clearly, isn’t hard-hitting social commentary with thoughtful insights and a heady moral.
Rather, the film simply wants to show how ridiculous prejudice is, and how it’s often predicated on stereotypes. Its strategy is mockery, and self-mockery, with a semi-serious suggestion that we all take another look at the minor differences that have been inflated over time into unbridgeable distinctions.
It’s inevitable, however, that a movie that mocks stereotypes will spend a good deal of time depicting them. “People of the book” is remade as “people of the checkbook,” and there are a couple too many nose jokes given that we’re well into the 21st century.
That said, it’s refreshing to discover that British filmmakers are immeasurably less cowed than their American counterparts by the idea of mining Muslim-Jewish tensions for laughs. And there are a lot of them — laughs, not chuckles — in “The Infidel.”
“The Infidel” screens 7:30 p.m. Feb. 9 in the Mostly British Film Festival (www.mostlybritish.org) at the Vogue Theatre in San Francisco.