Sun Cinema Series: Good things can be 'Arranged'

Here's a movie that asks the key question: Can we all keep our own culture and traditions and still get along?

You'll like the answer.

A miniature United Nations

In a Brooklyn public school – a "miniature United Nations" – two young women become acquainted as first-year teachers. One of them, Rochel, is an Orthodox Jew. The other, Nasira, is a Muslim of Syrian origin.

All the odds are against their being friends. Both women believe devoutly in their native religions and choose to dress the part. Even the young students ask why the two don't hate each other. After all, Muslims want to kill all the Jews, right?

Then there's the pressure on the women to renounce their quaint traditions and join the modern, cosmopolitan world. The school principal, a well-meaning but condescending "liberated" New Yorker, likes them both and appreciates their professional skills. But she wants them to rise above their suffocating "superstitions."

She is especially contemptuous of the ritual of arranged marriages, which makes them pawns in their "patriarchal" societies: "There was a woman's movement, you know."

Rising blood pressure

Certainly the courting process as practiced by the two families in question presents major challenges - both painful and funny.

For Rochel's parents, there's a great urgency. She's 22, and in another year she'll be an old maid. (She doesn't want to end up like that Rabinowitz girl!) So the case is to be handled by a professional matchmaker - a traditional "shadchen" - who will screen, select and schedule the suitors.

Some of the most richly comic moments occur during the bizarre succession of dates that are arranged for the bewildered Rochel. All the boys are nice enough, and "they have good jobs." But they are either pathologically shy, deadly boring or incurably self-absorbed.

Rochel naturally balks and finally locks herself in her bedroom. But the guilt quickly piles up. "Your father's blood pressure is up!" scolds her mother from the hallway. Worse, if the older sister isn't married, the younger sister's prospects, too, are ruined.

Finally, Rochel bolts from the house, to the sanctuary of a lapsed female cousin. Will the demure Rochel find fulfillment in the secular world of parties and stylish clothes?


Ancient adversaries

Things are off on the wrong foot for Nasira, too. Her father has in mind for her a cousin of his, an ill-mannered lout twice her age who hopes to carry her back to Syria. At least she has her mother on her side.

When another family friend comes into the picture, a handsome engineering student, there actually seems to be some hope that the traditional process will work to everyone’s satisfaction.

Wanting to share the happy feeling with Rochel, Nasira comes up with some ingenious and high-tech schemes to influence the Orthodox matchmaking ritual that seems to be oppressing her friend.

 In depicting the affection and the close similarities between these two women – modern descendents of ancient adversaries – this film offers nothing less than a formula for world peace.

If You Go: "Arranged" will be shown tonight, May 1, at 7:00 p.m. in the Historic Yuma Theater, 254 S. Main Street. The screening, part of the Sun Cinema Series, includes an independent short film and a hosted discussion. Language is American English. Run time of the feature is 93 minutes; admission is $3.