Coffee with Lemon Movie Review

Award-winning actress Tatyana Vasilyeva stars in Leonid Gorovets’ Coffee with Lemon. Great Russian actor Valery Ostrovsy (Alexander Abdulov) goes to Israel with his wife (Vasilyeva) and son, hoping for a better life. He winds up out of work because he can't speak Hebrew. Then he finds out he's won an award for his performance in a film he made before leaving Russia. This Israeli entry suggests that talent only appears to transcend the perennial challenge of a Jewish identity, and its downbeat conclusions indicate that, drawn to its most illogical extremes, belief in such an apparition leads to tragic consequences. By some startling coincidence, Alexander Proshkin's To See Paris and Die, made in Russia in 1993 and also starring Vasilyeva, had pretty much the same theme.

1994 94m/C IS Alexander Abdulov, Tatyana Vasilyeva, Bruria Albek; D: Leonid Gorovets; W: Semyon Vinokur; C: Valentin Belanogov.