In Finnish and French with English subtitles, the modern, campy farce “Let My People Go!” (Zeitgeist) follows a young gay couple, Ruben (the elastic Nicolas Maury) and Teemu (Jarkko Niemi), as their relationship is threatened by a variety of outside influences. The first and greatest is that postman Ruben unwittingly finds himself in possession of about 200,000 Euros. This causes such a rift between the pair that Ruben leaves rural Finland to return to what he thinks is the safety net of his family in Paris.
Arriving just in time for Passover, Ruben can sense the rather large black cloud hovering over everything: his nephew Gabriel, his relentless mother Rachel (Almodovar regular Carmen Maura), his unfaithful father Nathan (Jean-François Stévenin), his sister Irene’s (Amira Casar) marriage to gentile Herve (Charlie Dupont) and even his own difficulty sleeping. Things become even more complicated when elderly, widowed lawyer Goldberg (Jean-Luc Bideau) becomes enamored with Ruben. As Ruben puts it, his life has become “one bad Jewish joke.”
Back in Finland, Teemu learns the truth about the suspicious stash of cash. He hops on a plane to Paris to make amends with Ruben, but unfortunately, he’s about to make an appearance just as everything goes from bad to worse, including the arrest of Ruben, his brother Samuel (Clément Sibony) and Nathan. Lovesick Goldberg doesn’t help matters when he sends Teemu away. However, when Teemu appears at the door on the night of the Seder, like a blonde Elijah, it’s clear that Ruben’s days of suffering are over. I spoke with writer/director Mikael Buch about the film in early 2013. (“Let My People Go!” is screening on Apr. 27 and May 5 as part of the Miami Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. Visit mglff.com for more information.)
Gregg Shapiro: You co-wrote the screenplay for “Let My People Go!” with Christophe Honoré. how did the two of you come to work together on this project?
Mikael Buch: I met Christophe when I was at film school. I went to the National Film School in France. When you do your final study project in school you have to choose a kind of “godfather” tutor. I had just seen “Dans Paris”, one of his films, which I love very much, so I asked him to be my tutor. We met like that. Since then I’ve been working with him on some of his films. When the time came to write my film, it felt natural to work with him because he was the person who knew me the best and knew the kind of cinema I wanted to do.
GS: How much, if any, of you is in Ruben or Teemu?
MB: [Laughs] I think I’m more of a Ruben than Teemu, that’s for sure. But I’m not really Ruben either. The identity setting is autobiographical, but the character itself is imaginary. I think the character has a lot of things of me and a lot of the things of Nicolas Maury, the actor who plays Ruben, and a lot of things that are just out of my imagination.
GS: I’m glad that you mentioned Nicolas, because he is a marvelous physical comedian. He has an expressive and elastic face and when one of the characters says Ruben “wiggles like a worm,” he isn’t kidding.
MB: Meeting Nicolas has been really important for me. I had done two short films with him before “Let My People Go!” He has been really important, because before I met him I didn’t dare to do comedy. I had wanted to do comedy for a long time but I had been doing more dramatic films. When I met him he had such a special way of acting, being a comedian. He seemed like a modern Buster Keaton. That was very interesting and very inspiring to me. I was thinking of him when I wrote the part (of Reuben).
GS: “Let My People Go!” takes a humorous look at various relationships, including those between gay sons and their mothers and fathers. In one scene, Ruben accuses his mother Rachel of forcing him to relive his coming out, even though she knows he is gay.
MB: The important thing for us, when we wrote the script, was not doing a coming-out film. It shouldn’t be a film about coming out, but about a gay character that was accepted by his family. I want to talk about how family can accept a gay son because they love him. But there are still some stereotypes and ideas that exist inside the family. I wanted to talk about that, too. For example, how the mother accepts the fact that he’s gay, but maybe he’ll find a nice woman and he’ll settle down. The same thing with the father; when the father says you can’t preach to me because you’re gay, it’s a kind of idea that even if all of the family is really accepting of him and supportive, they still have stereotypical ideas about what homosexuality is.
GS: Carmen Maura, who plays Rachel, is perhaps best known for her work with Pedro Almodovar. “Let My People Go!” is reminiscent of Almodovar’s style of comedy. Is he a filmmaker who you consider to be an influence on your work?
MB: Ah, yes, very much so. I grew up in Spain, spent my whole childhood in Spain, and his films were important to me. Carmen was really more than an actress, she was an icon of my teenage years. I was really lucky to have her in the film. Because I had grown up in Spain, when I started the casting I wanted her to have a little bit of Spain in the film.
GS: “Let My People Go!” also gives us intimate relationships between older people – Ruben’s father Nathan and his mistress Francoise, attorney Goldberg and his longtime male companion Schwartz. Why was it important for you to include those kinds of relationships in the movie?
MB: I think it’s a film about every kind of love and desire. I was interested to explore that side. What was interesting about the Goldberg character to me was that he has such a joyful and liberated way of expressing himself, doing whatever he wants. I thought it was really funny to confront Ruben, who has a very complicated way of living his desires, with a character like that, who can allow himself to be the president of the Jewish community and at the same time go disco dancing at a gay club. He does whatever he wants [laughs].
GS: “Let My People Go!” employs humor to address the age old subject of Jews and Gentiles. Do you think that it will always be an “us versus them” relationship, or will the Jews and the “goyim” ever find common ground?
MB: I think that as long as we have real Jewish mothers [laughs] it will always be an issue. I think that was the whole idea of the (Jewish) spray (utiltized by Rachel). I think until we find a way to invent that in real life [laughs], I don’t think it will be resolved.
GS: Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments”, which you include in the movie, has become a staple of Passover entertainment. What would it mean to you if “Let My People Go!” shared a similar place of honor?
MB: That would be great. I don’t ask so much [laughs]. Just that people have a good time with the film. The first image I had when I started writing the script was of Reuben seeing the image of Charlton Heston in the Cecil B DeMille film. The whole idea was confront the image of the super Jew, the ideal of the Jewish son. Ruben is such a clumsy character…
GS: … he’s kind of a nebbish.
MB: [Laughs] Yes, absolutely. The whole comedy idea came from the gap between Charlton Heston and Ruben.
GS: Mikael, have you begun working on your next film project?
MB: Yes, I’m currently writing a script. It will be a comedy also. But I’m a little superstitious when I’m writing, so even my closest friends don’t know what I’m writing about. My mother keeps trying to call me to find out what I’m writing about, but she won’t know [laughs].
Follow