LOVE COMES LATELY

Director: Jan Schütte
Release Date: 2008
Runtime: 86 minutes
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Language: English
Website: www.imdb.com

Synopsis:
Love Comes Lately is a bittersweet film woven out of three Isaac Bashevis Singer stories about old age and the erotic imagination. Max Kohn (OTTO TAUSIG) is a writer in his seventies who is increasingly haunted by his weakening body and ebbing sexual prowess. The film opens with Max dreaming on an Amtrak train. In his dream, the conductor asks him if he sleeps with women anymore; the questioning becoming so intense and distressing that Max awakens, still disturbed by the interrogation. The remainder of the film similarly slips from the objective to the fictional world, as Max daydreams, flirts, longs for lost loves, dreams and pours his angst into his literary work.

The film's main narrative is based on Isaac Bashevis Singer's story “The Briefcase.” In Singer's semiautobiographical work, Max is an aging New York writer who travels the lecturing circuit, defending both his literary and sexual pride. His academic hosts thoughtlessly remind him that he's not as important as Kafka; his lectures are poorly attended as more exciting campus activities lure his already thin audience. His ego receives a much-needed boost during another dismal campus visit when he is unexpectedly reunited with an attractive former student, Rosalie (BARABARA HERSHEY).

In this memorable supporting performance, Hershey's Rosalie is an alluring and complex character-cynical and vulnerable, haunted life's disappointments. Drawn together by their shared past and a desire to blot out the present, Max and Rosalie find themselves in her apartment but not without complications, the most pressing of which is his steady relationship with the long-suffering Reisel (RHEA PERLMAN).

Stuck in New York, Reisel tends to her ailing mother, while the itinerant Max comes and goes. She sees evidence of Max's infidelity everywhere and one gets the sense that one more indiscretion will be the last straw. Perlman plays the role with great skill, never allowing Reisel to simply be a victim or nag. She is jealous and suspicious, but Perlman allows us to see that hurt, disappointment, and Max's disregard for her feelings have hardened her into a person she does not wish to be.