Saturday Night At The Movies

Hey-guys have body issues, too

By Dennis Hartley

A Matter of Size: But is the chankonabe parve?

You know-us dogs aren’t really so much of the dogs that we think we are.
-Marty Pilleti, to his date; from the 1955 film Marty

When you hear the phrase “star athlete”, it invariably conjures up visualization of a man or a woman with sinewy arms and legs, attached to a V-shaped torso reinforced by abs of steel. In other words, nothing akin to the doughy and mockingly anti-Olympian specimen that gawks back at us from our full-length mirror (er, well…speaking for myself). Granted, there is the odd exception-Babe Ruth, CC Sabathia, David Wells, George Foreman, John Daly and Charles Barkley come to mind (and give some of us hope). Not that I ever even considered pro sports as a career path-but at some point in our lives, those of us who are “persons of size” must make peace with the cards we have been dealt.

Herzl (Itzak Cohen), the unlikely “sports hero” of a delightful new Full Monty-esque audience-pleaser from Israel called A Matter of Size has been dealing with his “cards” for some thirty-odd years, and has yet to come up with a winning hand. Sweet-natured, puppy-eyed and tipping the scales at 340 pounds, he lives with his overbearing mother, Mona (Levana Finkelstein) and works at a restaurant, commandeering a salad bar. Mona loves her son, but has odd ways of expressing it (chiefly due to her lack of a social filter). “You’re getting too fat!” she scolds, belaboring the obvious; but then in the next breath she’s encouraging him to finish up some delicious leftovers in the fridge (eating and complaining-two things my people excel at). Poor Herzl can’t even get a self-esteem boost from the one place you would expect encouragement from- his weight watchers group, lorded over by the passive-aggressive Geula (Evelyn Hagoel) who runs meetings more like Ilsa the She-Wolf of the SS than an empathetic counselor. She makes no bones about her disappointment with Herzl’s recent weight gain, threatening to eighty-six him.

Just when you think the situation couldn’t get more demoralizing for the hapless Herzl, he gets fired from his job, essentially for being visually unaesthetic to the workplace (read: Management objects to having a morbidly obese employee tending the salad bar). But then, two things happen to Herzl that could potentially turn his present state of gloom around: he experiences a mutual spark of attraction with a lovely woman in his weight watchers group (Irit Kaplan) and finds a new job at a Japanese restaurant, managed by an ex-pro sumo coach (Togo Igawa). Guess what happens? (Hint: As you probably know, sumo is a sport that celebrates and reveres big fellers, elevating them to rock star status).

It would have been easy for directors Sharon Maymon and Erez Tadmor to wring cheap laughs from such a predominately corpulent cast, but much to their credit (and Danny Cohen-Solal, who co-scripted with Maymon) the characters (and actors who play them) ultimately emerge from their trials and tribulations with dignity and humanity fully intact. Even the sight of four supersized Israeli gentlemen bounding through a grassy field, garbed in naught but their lipstick-red mawashis makes you want to stand up and cheer (as opposed to pointing and snickering). Ditto for an endearing, sensitively directed seduction scene between Herzl and his girlfriend, and a subplot concerning one of Herzl’s buddies who, empowered via the sumo training, begins his journey of coming out as a gay man. Needless to say, the film is ultimately about self-acceptance, in all of its guises.

And that’s a good thing.

Yes you can-I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With, The Tao of Steve, Heavy, Turtle Diary, Paprika, Zelig, Muriel’s Wedding, Georgy Girl, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Now Voyager, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, Heavy Weights, Rocky, Bend it Like Beckham, Laagan: Once Upon a Time in India, Brassed Off, Cool Runnings, Mystery Alaska, Cosi, Billy Elliot.

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