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Go for Zucker!

The cliché holds that German comedies are as rare as snow in July, which isn’t quite true. Not only does the German film industry make as many comedies as any other country, it produced two of the greatest comic directors in cinema history, Ernst Lubitsch and Billy Wilder. What is rare is a German comedy that works with international viewers who might not recognize the sociopolitical issues underlying the humor.

That is somewhat true of Go for Zucker!, which plays in part on the continued post-reunification tensions of residents from the East and West sides of the wall. Nonetheless, this is a movie with plenty of laughs even for viewers who don’t know Angela Merkel from Studs Terkel.

Alluding to Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Jaeckie Zucker (Henry Huebchen) greets us from his hospital bed, where he is in a coma. Despite indications that he is not in the best of circumstances, he explains that he has just been through both the best and worst week of his life.

Self-supporting in East Germany since the age of 14, when his mother and brother Samuel fled to West Germany, Jaeckie was doing well for awhile as a TV sports announcer. Since the wall came down, though, he’s been supporting himself by hustling pool. Along the way he has run up enormous debts and alienated his family: his wife kicks him out of the house, he hasn’t seen his daughter in two years, and his son the bank manager threatens to have him arrested for nonpayment on his loans.

What might just save Jaeckie’s skin is the death of his mother. Regretful at the bitterness caused by her flight to the West, she stipulates in her will that her two sons will inherit her estate only if they make an effort to reconcile.

Simple enough, except for the underlying conditions. Although Jaeckie never took any notice of it, his family was Jewish, and in the years since they left his mother and brother became Orthodox. Because she wants to be buried where she was born, Mom’s will requires that the sons work out their differences while sitting shiva at Jaeckie’s house. Never mind that the Zucker household is as kosher as a bacon cheeseburger; confinement to the house for seven days means that Jaeckie will be unable to participate in the pool tournament whose 100,000 Euro prize is his last chance at evading jail and wholesale ruin. Clearly, it’s going to take every lie, canard and subterfuge in his arsenal to get Jaeckie through this week.

Initially conceived as a film for television illustrating personal conflicts in a family that had been separated by the Wall, Go For Zucker! was such a hit with test audiences that it was released theatrically, where it was one of last year’s biggest hits in Germany (winning that country’s film awards for Best Film, Leading Actor, Screenplay and Director, as well as the Ernst Lubitsch Award for Best German Comedy.)

Director Dani Levy (who produced the film through the company he runs with partner Tom Twyker, director of Run Lola Run), says that he was attracted to doing a Jewish comedy because of that culture’s “blunt, brazen and self-ironic treatment of human weaknesses and quirks.” Like German comedies in general, Go For Zucker! has an unapologetically broad tone that inevitably gets called “politically incorrect” in the US. Still, every use of a negative stereotype is balanced out by a positive characteristic, and like the French classic Mad Adventures of Rabbi Jacob, it’s all performed with a gleeful panache that makes it impossible to dislike.

—m.faust