One of my favourite Jewish holiday foods is tzimmes, which is a stew made from carrots, sweet potatoes, prunes, orange juice, brown sugar or honey, some cinnamon and a bit of wine. It’s delicious comfort food. The Yiddish word “tzimmes” means mixture or muddle. Why are you making such a tzimmes? means Why are you making things more complicated than they need to be? Argentine filmmaker Daniel Burman has made a complete tzimmes with his latest film, TRANSMITZVAH. .

Rubén Singman is about to turn 13 and his family is excited for his upcoming bar mitzvah. At dinner before the big day, Rubén puts on a wig, dress, stockings and high heels and performs an upbeat version of an old Yiddish classic song, “Chiribim Chiribom”, complete with orchestration coming, presumably, from the heavens above. With the performance over, Rubén announces that he’s refusing to have a bar mitzvah because he plans to transition. Needless to say, that doesn’t go down too well with his father, a successful men’s clothier in Buenos Aires. His mother and older brother, Eduardo, however, are not too surprised by the announcement. Fast forward 20-odd years and Rubén, who now goes by the name of Mumy Singer (Penélope Guerrero), is a pop diva based in Spain singing tarted up 1970s bar mitzvah Hebrew dance floor staples to a global audience. Though she’s only kept in touch with Eduardo (Juan Minujín, THE TWO POPES) over the years, their father’s illness brings her home. It’s then when Mumy decides to have not just a bat mitzvah but one that honours her past as well.

There is so much going on with this story that it’s nearly impossible not to pack it in after 30 minutes. It’s a complete tzimmes all right, and not a good one either. Arcs begin and then disappear, motivations are never fully explained, and characters show up out of nowhere. One of the most egregious examples is Eduardo’s homelife. We come to learn that he’s planning to divorce his wife but can’t bring himself to pulling the trigger. He says at one point that he’s tired of he and his wife hurting each other but the movie only has one very brief scene when they are together. Why he can’t bring himself to asking for a divorce seems to have something to do with them having one car. He works in his father’s shop which, presumably, he’s going to inherit. Go out and buy another car, you yutz!

That arc pales, however, to Mumy’s journey. She goes to Buenos Aires with her husband? partner? choreographer? costume designer? manager? all of the above?, Sergio (Gustavo Bassani), and Eduardo notes that she doesn’t plan to perform while she’s there. Cut to the next scene and there are bus stops plastered with posters of her face and she’s performing her poorly lip-synched Jewish-themed repertoire along with her five Mumy dancers to a packed house in the Teatro General San Martin. As for her bat mitzvah, she wants to wear tefillin (phylacteries) that day, which is a no-go for every Orthodox rabbi around. So is having a bat mitzvah for a transsexual but that’s neither here nor there. A bit of explanation, however, is required at this point for anyone not familiar with tefillin. These are the little leather prayer boxes that men wear on their heads and arm during morning prayers. Mumy wants to embrace her Rubén side, which is fair enough, but tefillin are not worn on the Sabbath, which is when 99% of bar mitzvahs take place. (The only other days when you can have a bar mitzvah are Mondays and Thursdays, when the Torah is read. Many religious families also have a mini bar mitzvah on the Thursday before so that the boy can put on tefillin for the first time.) If Mumy wants to wear tefillin to her transmitzvah, and she is able to find a rabbi who agrees to perform it, who is going to stop her? Nevertheless, this seems to be an insurmountable obstacle that results in Mumy and Eduardo flying off to Toledo, Spain to find a 13^th century rabbi who will magically appear to them at the right time. When’s the right time, you ask? You would think it would have something to do with the plastic handbell that Rubén’s parents were planning to give out to everyone at his bar mitzvah. The souvenir keeps making an appearance throughout the story but, no, it’s not that. It’s something even dumber.

Burman, who also wrote the story along with his longtime collaborator, Ariel Gurevich, started out with a good premise but, for whatever reason, decided it wasn’t enough. They felt it needed a dozen other story arcs, some fantastical elements and a bunch of stuff that just doesn’t make any sense at all. TRANSMITZVAH is a great example of disobeying the “KISB” rule – Keep it simple, boychik!

TRANSMITZVAH is streaming now on Netflix. Your time will be much better spent making tzimmes.

I was only able to find a trailer with Spanish subtitles but be assured that Netflix has the movie with English subtitles.

Thanks for reading but don’t be a lurker! If you liked what you just read, here are some suggestions:

Sign up to receive my movie reviews in your inbox automatically
Share this review on your Facebook page
Leave me a message telling me what you thought of my review or the film
Bookmark the site and visit often
Like my Howard For Film Facebook page
Watch my reviews on my YouTube page
Check out my Howard For Film magazine on Flipboard
Tell your friends about the site