Metallic Blues, directed by Danny Verete. Israel/Canada/Germany, 2004, 89 min., 25 mm, Hebrew/English/German with subtitles.

By Donald H. Harrison

There is a Mercedes car dealer in San Diego County, Bill Hoehn, who has developed an entire television advertising campaign around his misadventures in Germany.  The tagline of each commercial says that while he doesn't speak German, he certainly can sell German.

Woe unto Israeli used car dealers Shmuel and Siso, who can do neither.  Metallic Blues is a story of how their get-rich-quick scheme turns to naught.  They purchased a clean,  metallic blue Lincoln Continental limousine for $5,000 from an Arab who brought it to Israel from Quebec. They are certain that the Lincoln—pronounced "Link-o-lin" by Hebrew speakers—will fetch between eight to ten times that amount from a classic car dealer in Dusseldorf, Germany.



Expecting to stay only a couple of days, they put their clothes into carry-on bags and head for Germany   It's another kind of "baggage" that transforms this film from a story of two buddies on the road to a psychodrama in which Shlomo, who bears a concentration camp tattoo on his arm, relives his boyhood horrors—starting as soon as the casually dressed Israelis attempt to drive the luxury car out of the Port of Hamburg, to which the car had been shipped.  

A guard with steely eyes orders them out of the car and into a building to be searched — immediately triggering Shlomo's Holocaust memories. Satisfied the two car salesmen are not terrorists, the guard wishes them a good visit in Germany.  He gives them the friendly advice that if they don't want to be searched again and again, they had better buy some clothes befitting the owners of such a luxury automobile—their perceptions and German realities being at considerable variance.

Soon Shlomo and Siso are spending up to their new image, banking on the expectation that they will recover all that money and more once the dealer in Dusseldorf takes the car off their hands.  You don't need a roadmap to imagine how quickly their plans will go awry.

This is a movie that runs along two tracks—the chronicle of their misadventures, and the flashbacks to a boy's Holocaust experiences that color nearly everything that Shlomo sees. In fact, nearly every Jew who visits Germany for the first time experiences some of the dread that Shlomo feels when he hears German words like "Achtung," blared over a loudspeaker, sees a train pulling away from a station, looks at a ceiling shower, or views a smokestack.  

There are some special moments in the film—the ending, which I shall not give away, and a scene in a small hotel room where the buddies say the Chanukah blessings over two candles they put in a window overlooking the railroad yards.

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Metallic Blues will be shown twice during the 16th annual San Diego Jewish Film Festival.  It will be featured at 6:15 p.m., Saturday, February 11, in the AMC La Jolla Theatre and at 1 p.m., Sunday, February 12, at the Hazard Center UltraStar.  A special feature is a planned personal appearance at the festival by Moshe Ivgy, who played Siso.