By Randy Fadem
LA JOLLA, Caifornia (Press Release)–Have you ever seen a Mozart clarinet concerto played on the forearm of a young man by his auditioning girlfriend? In Adam’s Wall, a delightful modern version of a Romeo and Juliet love story two college students, a young Jewish man and a young Lebanese woman, fall in love. Though beset by familial ghosts and tsores from their respective grandfather and father they wander through the environs of Montreal to find each other and set some of their ghosts to rest.
This little gem of a film takes a refreshingly different approach to film composition. Instead of the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of their generation, Jesse Aaron Dwyre appears as a nerdy, gawking, hesitant young man. He plays opposite Flavia Bechara for whom the camera captures the vein that runs vertically from the top of her hairline to the cleft between her eyebrows, as well as the uneven planes of her face, to the small gap between her front teeth.
Flavia Bechara’s character, Yasmine has come to Montreal to study literature. Her father has opened an art gallery in Montreal and her mother has remained behind in Lebanon. She is surprised and quite angered to discover her father has started a relationship with another woman. Both parents had withheld from her the twists and turns that their marriage had taken. Adam Levy, played by Dwyre, lost his parents to a shooting accident in Israel. He was in the back seat of the car at the time and reclaimed his mother’s clarinet as a keepsake.
He meets Yasmine when he goes to the university to keep an appointment for a clarinet audition.
The movie contains many tender and touching scenes such as the one alluded to in the opening sentence. Here Adam has brought his treasure trove of his mother’s records which features the clarinet, which he had buried under a wall of rocks in the cemetery to preserve them from his grandfather’s ire. He brought them, as a love token, to Yasmine’s bedroom where she has a record player. As they play a Mozart clarinet concerto she takes his forearm and begins to play her own composition.
The Canadian film will be shown at the San Diego Jewish Film Festival at 11 a.m. Monday, Feb. 15, in the Garfield Theatre of the Jewish Community Center.
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Fadem is a freelance writer based in La Mesa, Califorina