Local Call directed by Arthur Joffe, France, 2004, 102 min, 35mm, French w/ subtitles

By Donald H. Harrison

Perhaps when the movie Ne Quittez Pas ("Don't Quit") was given the English title of Local Call, the decision makers were thinking of that story about the American president whose intelligence service found a way to telephone heaven, but, alas, such a call was impractical because the toll charges alone would double the national debt.  On a trip to Jerusalem, the president confided his sad but exhilarating news to Israel's prime minister, who promptly handed the president his own phone.  "Go ahead, Mr. President," said the prime minister.  "From here, it's a local call."

When we watch this movie fable, those of us who live near the Mexican border where we are used to hearing Spanish, wonder if perhaps they should have titled the movie, "a loco call."  You see, the life of Felix Mandel (Sergio Castellito) goes on a downhill roller coaster ride after giving  his father's black overcoat to a street person.  His father telephones him collect to tell him that he is absolutely outraged that his son had done such a thing, and that he must retrieve the coat immediately.  But how can this be? thinks the son. His father, Lucien,  has been dead for two years!

However, the caller indeed sounds like his rough-speaking father and also knows things about his childhood that nobody else would know, so Felix does as he is told.  The coat, in fact, was an important piece in Felix's memories of his father's death.  Lucien had asked him to fetch the coat from the tailor shop—a routine enough errand until the tailor told him that he absolutely would not do the alterations his father had requested, nor would he explain why. When Felix returned to Lucien's apartment, he had found him dead in the bathroom.

Ever since Lucien's death, Felix's behavior had become so obsessive—for example, almost never throwing anything away from his cluttered study—that his wife had become increasingly alienated from him.  When he becomes fixated upon receiving these telephone calls, she fears he is becoming insane. Could this man, whom she no longer loved, harm their son?  Such fears appear more than justified when, in one riotous sequence, Felix , listening on his cell phone while driving through Paris, tries to take down his father's phone number in heaven—a very long sequence of numbers with ring tones sounding like Hatikvah.  He crashes the car through the window of a butcher shop, and has his driver's license revoked.



The accident is only the beginning of Felix's improbable troubles.  There are those tremendous toll charges one must pay just to call heaven!  Worse, Felix stays on the phone far longer than three minutes each call because he and his father have many unresolved issues to discuss. Financial and domestic matters go from bad to worse—as Felix's life plummets toward hitting the bottom which, in fables, one must hit before one can recover.

How this all ends up is not for me to say, but there is another bit of word play that is critical to the plot.  Desperate for answers, Felix tells his story to a rabbi, who doesn't seem surprised in the least that Felix can talk to someone in heaven.  The conversation occurs in the morning when the rabbi still is wearing his tefillin.  The rabbi emphasizes the verbal connection for Felix, "Telephone, Tefillin,"— how alike the two words sound!  

Local Call will be shown twice during the 16th Annual San Diego Jewish Film Festival: 5 p.m., Tuesday, February 14 at the AMC La Jolla Theatres, and at 8:30 p.m., Saturday, at the Poway UltraStar.