SHEM (Caroline Roboh, 2004)

Lambasted by reviewers, Shem—which means name in Hebrew—certainly has its share of shortcomings. But it’s hardly the worst film of its kind in recent memory. That would be Ron Howard’s The DaVinci Code (2006).
     Asier (Ash) Newman, looking and sounding like Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, is perfectly cast as 19-year-old Daniel, a hedonistic Londoner whose elderly Jewish grandmother gives him a mission: to find her father’s grave. Rabbi Theodor Weiss, en route to England, disappeared in 1939. Striking suspenseful notes, especially as Daniel is being shadowed and finds himself trailing others who are inquiring into Weiss’s destiny, Daniel’s journey takes him to Paris, Berlin, Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia and Rome (I would have preferred Moscow). Daniel keeps giving people he asks to help him different false names; without knowing it, he is in search of his own identity.
     Many find the film schematic (a fair charge), rangy and incomprehensible, dismissive about casual sex and too-embracing of religious feeling and roots; whatever. But when the official in Prague directs Daniel to Kafka’s grave, I smiled; and when a stranger, who disappears in a graveyard as mysteriously as he appeared, encourages the boy to pursue his quest after the boy crumbles, declaring himself “useless,” I wept. Throughout, self-involved Daniel learns to believe in and embrace the reality of others while taking in a brace of history, including Nazism and the post-Communist wreckage in Eastern Europe.
     I have a theory about the critical revulsion to writer-director Caroline Roboh’s engrossing, entertaining film. I believe in many cases it has to do with the fact that Daniel is unabashedly bisexual. It certainly is not the case, as one commentator stupidly asserts, that it’s left unexplained how Daniel’s grandmother knew her grandson would be in Rome. Their final reunion is crystal-clear.