These anxious wallflowers and neurotic matriarchs (spitting out such one-liners as “She looks like Gwyneth Paltrow on food stamps, and not in a good way”) have the ring of truth that leads to stereotype, not the other way round.įill the Void (2012): ‘A non-critical view of arranged marriage.’ Photograph: Allstar/NORMA PRODUCTIONS/Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar Tensely structured but with a loose, reckless tongue, Seligman’s debut is clearly working on intimately familiar turf: her characters feel drawn from life, not other fictions. What none of them know is that she’s making money on the side by offering sexual services to older men when one of them shows up at the shiva too, with his wife and baby in tow, a classic bedroom-farce setup bumps up against more modern, abrasive inquiries into gender roles, sexual autonomy and queer identity. Between bagels and murmured condolences, she gets her elders’ thoughts on everything from her weight (too thin) to her college major (too trivial) to her bisexuality (verboten, particularly with her sometime girlfriend also at the event).
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University student Danielle (comedian Rachel Sennott, in a wicked breakthrough) is the only child of a middle-class New York Jewish couple, reluctantly dragged to the shiva for a family friend she barely remembers. There, it’s been hailed as an immediate classic of Jewish cinema, a subgenre as rich and flavourful in its sensibility as Christian faith-based films are, well, not.Ī shiva is a Jewish wake, and sure enough, Seligman’s film seeks out any number of inappropriate comic avenues to pursue at a single funereal gathering, over the course of just 77 wince-filled minutes.
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Emma Seligman’s Shiva Baby is a blunt, salty-sharp blast of inspired farce, arriving in the UK on a tide of cultish enthusiasm from across the Atlantic. Missed it? Don’t worry: it’s gone straight to streaming on Mubi instead.
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E arlier this week, the best comedy of the year played in cinemas for a one-night-only engagement.