Political correctness may have wiped out ethnic comedy in this country, but for those who still can laugh at cultural clashes, there is “Leon the Pig Farmer” from England, sort of a “Monty Python Goes Kosher.”
“Leon,” with an impressive cast and a script commissioned by Python’s Eric Idle, takes an old and serviceable fantasy-what if your parents (and therefore your heritage) turned out not to be your parents?-and gives it enough oddball turns to make it fresh and vastly amusing.
Leon of the title is a young London man who is smothered by life, by his Orthodox Jewish family and its expectations, by the savage opportunism of his work in real estate, by the guilt that has him imagining that perfect strangers kibitz on his most intimate dilemmas.
A woman he loves, who is Jewish, tells him she prefers her men to be adventurous (“boxers, tree surgeons”), which he is not. A woman he doesn’t love, who isn’t Jewish, is eager to seduce him upon learning he is. (“Daddy hates Jews,” she croons in ecstasy.)
His distorted psyche, expressed on film by tight camera angles and a deadpan acceptance of the peculiar, is about to implode when he discovers that his biological father is not Sydney Geller, a London draper, but Brian Chadwick, a Yorkshire pig farmer. He heads to Yorkshire, where the warmth of the Chadwicks’ greeting and his culturally inherited aversion to pigs put him once more in conflict, but also on the road to self-discovery.
Under the co-direction of young filmmakers Vadim Jean and Gary Sinyor, “Leon” occasionally belabors its own wit and ethnic self-consciousness. But, over all, with its unlikely combination of wackiness and Borscht Belt gags, it’s the sprightliest comedy to come here from England since “A Fish Called Wanda.”
Although most of its humor is derived from the situation of being Jewish, the film is just as funny skewering WASPs. The Chadwicks, for example, are introduced as one big, happy, multiply divorced family.
The film’s later scenes are particularly hilarious, with the Chadwicks trying to make Leon feel more at home by becoming more Jewish. Their eventual meeting with Leon’s London parents, who promptly start drinking tea and lengthening their vowels in converse gestures of assimilation, is a classic.
Local filmgoers will have to make an effort to see “Leon the Pig Farmer,” whose screening schedule makes it as elusive as an endangered species. It is being shown three times at the Film Center of the Art Institute and twice at the Skokie Theater.
”LEON THE PIG FARMER”
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Produced and directed by Vadim Jean and Gary Sinyor; written by Sinyor and Michael Normand; production designed by Simon Hicks; photographed by Gordon Hickie; edited by Ewa J. Lind. A Cinevista release; plays 8 p.m. Saturday and Feb. 26, 6 p.m. Feb. 27 at the Film Center of the Art Institute; and at noon Sunday and Feb. 27 at the Skokie Theater. Running time: 1:38. Not rated by the MPAA. Adult situations and discussions about sex.
THE CAST
Leon Geller…………………………………..Mark Frankel
Judith Geller…………………………………Janet Suzman
Brian Chadwick………………………………..Brian Glover
Yvonne Chadwick……………………………….Connie Booth
