Dover Kosashvili's LATE MARRIAGE is a dark comedy about a 33-year-old Israeli humanities student named Zaza who allows his domineering parents, aunts, and uncles to redirect his life and spoil his happiness, thus turning himself into a bitter cynic who seethes with barely controlled passive-aggressive resentment. Funny, huh? I like the premise and think it could’ve been developed into an excellent film if it were given a completely serious treatment. Unfortunately, Kosashvili decided to go with a partly comic treatment, and his feeble attempts to interject sit-com humor into a sad story are inappropriate and unsuccessful.

What about character development? The older members of the family are immigrants from Georgia who have brought an old-fashioned wife-selection tradition with them and insist on imposing that tradition on Zaza. The men bully the women, yell at them and threaten them with physical violence; the women stolidly accept this abuse and join forces with the men to bully Zaza. This is fine as far as it goes, but we learn absolutely nothing else about the characters; they are not developed in any other way; they aren't fleshed out; they have no depth, no complexity, no realness

. This makes for a boring movie. Every scene involving the family repeats the same bullying routine, and the presentation is always prolonged and slowly paced. To break the monotony Kosashvili includes a long, intermittent sex scene. The critics love this movie, and in particular they rave about the realness and believability of the sex scene. Frosty and I discussed it afterwards in the lobby of the Starz Film Center; we agreed that the scene is okay, maybe a little better than average in the believability department, but nothing to go gaga over.

My rating on the Watson scale: 2