Love and gender get crossed in comic ‘Man is a Woman’

Simon has a problem and it's not that he's gay. He likes being gay. His problem is his nice Jewish family. They don't like that he's gay. And when a rich uncle offers to share the wealth if Simon lives a "normal" life by getting married and making babies, the struggling jazz musician has to decide what to do.

Jean-Jacques Zilbermann's romantic comedy "Man is a Woman" has as much heart as it has laughs. Filmed in Paris and New York, it is a kind of "Kissing Jessica Stein" from a masculine point of view. Set to play the Sonoma Jewish Film Festival on Thursday, it is sure to be a hit. The film was a particular favorite at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival several years ago. If you missed it then, here's a chance to catch it.

Although not strictly a musical, the film features lots of great music — the least of its charms.

Simon (Antoine de Caunes) has inherited his father's clarinet and the talent to go with it (the great klezmer virtuoso Giora Feidman does the honors on the soundtrack).

The movie begins — titles running over fairly graphic scenes from a gay bathhouse — with Feidman's soaring clarinet as Simon cruises. Quick segue to a family wedding. Very classy and very mainstream Jewish — except Simon, who has always had a yen for his about-to-be-married cousin David, tries to seduce the groom.

Fed up with his nephew's lifestyle and desperate to continue the family line, rich Uncle Sol comes up with a proposition: He will give Simon 10 million francs and his mansion if he marries a woman and produces an heir.

Heaven knows the indigent musician needs the money — especially after his rich uncle freezes his line of credit at the family bank and changes the lock on his apartment door. His très chic mother, who has been reduced to selling perfume at a Paris department store, urges him to take it. "If you have to suffer, suffer rich," she counsels him. "Get married and then you can get divorced."

She even provides the girl. Rosalie (Elsa Zilberstein, who made a stunning Jewish Film Festival debut in the 1994 "Mina Tennenbaum"), is attractive, innocent (a virgin, yet) and fixated on clarinets. A Brooklyn-born singer of Yiddish songs (her beautiful voice is provided by singer Rosalie Becker), Rosalie has fled to France in order to escape her repressive Orthodox father.

A guest at David's wedding, she falls in love with the tune Simon plays, long before she meets the musician.

The complications are manifold. Simon and Rosalie actually do fall in love and marry, but the obvious sexual issues get in the way. Not to mention her fervently religious family, which includes a disapproving papa and a younger brother who comes out of the closet to confess his attraction to his new brother-in-law.

In French and English and with subtitles, the film features a cast of Yiddishe mamas, papas, uncles and cousins that is flawless, with leads seemingly born for one another.

The bittersweet ending gives a bow to "Casablanca" as the lovers stand on a rainy New York street. Except it's funny, as is the rest of this very much of-the-moment movie.

"Man is a Woman" screens at 1:30 and 7:15 p.m. Thursday at the Rialto Cinemas Lakeside, 551 Summerfield Road, Santa Rosa, as part of the Sonoma County Jewish Film Series, sponsored by the Jewish Community Agency of Sonoma County. Tickets are $8 for matinee, $9 evenings and $6 for students 18 and under. Information: (707) 528-4222 or http://www.jcagency.org.