I know what all you seasoned English majors and inveterate litterateurs are thinking. You’re thinking you’ve seen Shakespeare done and done in by inventive and inane interpreters in more ways than you can stomach. You’re thinking you’ve seen his most famous play, Romeo and Juliet, updated to new settings and contexts in innumerable and insufferable variety. You’re thinking that the last thing the world needs is yet another twist on a story so old, so familiar that it would take another James Joyce to render it surprising. You’ve seen the musical version (West Side Story), the Disney version (High School Musical), the Verona Beach version (Romeo + Juliet), and the biographical version (Shakespeare in Love), and you’re thinking that nothing could ever compel you to watch another goddamn version of that godforsaken masterpiece.
And actually, if that really is how you feel, then you can stop reading right now, because Eve Annenberg’s Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish is going to do very little to change your mind. In the catalog of the play’s history, Annenberg’s new film will stand as the Yiddish, mumblecore, meta-narrative version, and aside from a few cute flourishes and the sheer novelty of seeing the actors speak Yiddish, there’s not much to salvage for the Shakespeare-wary viewer.
Annenberg stars as Ava, a jaded, middle-aged ER nurse who long ago lost her Jewish faith. When a faculty member in her graduate program tells her to modernize an old transcript of the famous play translated into Yiddish, she resorts to commissioning the assistance of three Orthodox Jews who have been kicked out of their communities. Lazer (Lazer Weiss) and his friends are homeless degenerates, living off of credit card fraud and petty crime. Their insulated background — all three still speak Yiddish and have only barely learned to get by on the outside — makes it difficult for them to understand the emotions and politics behind the play. As Ava struggles with her own faith, the four of them make Romeo and Juliet a meeting ground for their respective worlds, modernizing the characters and setting, and acting out the play’s roles in parallel scenes that crosscut with the real-life action.
The film is shot with an amateurism that alternates between delightful and cloying. Annenberg, whose other directorial effort is 1997’s super-indie Dogs: The Rise and Fall of an All Girl Bookie Joint, uses untrained actors, a handheld camera, and improvised dialogue to maintain an air of playful magic as the two threads, the Shakespearean and the Jewish, slowly intertwine. Occasionally, Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish ignites into flirty charm, especially when Ava’s Jewish translators, played by real ex-Orthodox young men, are digesting the original play on their own terms. Most of the time, however, the movie slips into meaningless correspondences and stale lessons learned.
Matters aren’t helped much by the grating and omnipresent soundtrack, which provides a steady but rather un-enlightening commentary on the film’s events and includes such baby-faced whiners as Panic at the Disco! and The All-American Rejects alongside the traditional instrumental affectations. The music adds another hard-to-swallow layer to Annenberg’s admittedly ballsy Shakespeare riff. With Jewish traditionalism, Gen X angst, Shakespearean romance, and 21st-century vapidity, Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish may not be the richest adaptation yet, but it’s probably the most cluttered. It all adds up to a little too much allusion and much too little substance.
