Let My People Go

Zany French-Jewish-gay screwball comedy
Imagine my surprise when out of the blue this weekend this movie shows up at my local art-house theatre here in Cincinnati without any pre-release announcements or ads, even more so since this movie is now almost two years old now (and being released onto DVD soon)! I figure this surely wouldn't play very long in the theatre, so I went to see it right away.

"Let My People Go!" (2011 release from France; 86 min.) brings the story of Reuben (played by Nicolas Maury), a Jewish-French guy who lives in Finland with his Finnish boyfriend Teemu. As the movie opens, we see Reuben, a mailman, making his rounds in the local town. At one point Reuben delivers a registered package to one of the locals, who upon opening the package and seeing that it is full of money, wants nothing to do with the package and tries to give it back. He and Reuben get in a tussle and the local man dies of a heart attack. In a semi-panic, Reuben decides to take the package. Back home he counts the money:...

Thoroughly delightful
Let My People Go! is the most delightful movie I've seen in ages. Nicolas Maury is so utterly adorable, so sweetly, innocently, devastatingly sexy, so fascinating to watch every second he's on screen, that I wish he'd already starred in dozens of movies so I could watch them all. Since he hasn't, I'll have to sift through the few in which he has appeared in smaller roles.

His seemingly unselfconscious charm makes this whole movie a great joy to watch, and I can't imagine it without him at its heart - but everybody else in it and behind it is so good that I'd give it a try anyway.

Maury plays Reuben Steiner (spelled Ruben in the credits), a gay French Jew living in Finland with Teemu, his Finnish husband. His scheme to start a sauna business has failed and he's working as a mailman.

A man on his mail route gives him an envelope containing almost 200,000 euro and then appears to drop dead. Teemu gets angry at Ruben for taking the money and kicks him out,...

Sweetly madcap gay-inclusive romatic comedy
Ruben is a bit of a slacker, a native Frenchman who moved to Finland to start a business, but ended up just working as a mailman while shacking up with his hunky blonde boyfriend, Teemu. Their domestic bliss hits a speed bump, when Ruben comes home with a bag of money that a resident on his route gave him, right before he keeled over, likely dead of a heart attack. Teemu throws out Ruben, who takes the money and goes home to France, joining his large Jewish family, right before the Passover holiday. As the only gay member of the family, Ruben has always felt like a bit of an outcast, but soon learns that there's plenty of dysfunction to go around, with his cheating father, physically-aggressive brother, overly-dramatic mother, and a sister who is trying to hide her own marital problems. Then there's their longtime family attorney, who picks him up at a gay bar and pledges eternal devotion.

This is a madcap romantic comedy, capably directed and acted, although...

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