By Lisa Nesselson
Calling all programmers and distribs in search of the first Jewish cell phone comedy of the decade: Scripter-helmer Arthur Joffé has your number in Local Call! A keenly lensed fantasy which — like Joffé's Alberto Express and Let There Be Light! — bends reality in ways we'd all like to sample. Tale of an astronomer who runs up an astronomical phone bill is inventive and amusing for most of its running time. Fable-like venture stumbles toward the end but offers engaging characters and a buoyant desire to entertain.
Forty-year-old professor Felix Mandel (Sergio Castellitto) lives in Paris with his wife Lucie (Isabelle Gelinas) and their 3-year-old son. On his way back to France from a conference in New York, Felix stops in London to visit his first love, Wendy (Emily Morgan), who he hasn't seen since they were 11.
Felix is sweet and deeply nostalgic by nature, but his wife, floored that he would see his childhood girl friend to try to relive his childhood, tosses out everything in his overflowing home office, leaving only the cashmere overcoat that belonged to his father Lucien. Lucien has been dead for two years but Felix hasn't finished grieving.
Resolved to please his wife — and haunted by the memories the coat stirs up — Felix gives the coat to a homeless bum (Dominique Pinon). As soon as Felix returns home, the phone rings and the operator asks if he'll accept a collect call. To Felix's astonishment, it's his father (voice of Michel Serrault) berating him for giving away his overcoat. Felix is soon speaking to and arguing regularly with his dead dad, whose phone number contains some two dozen digits.
When his banker (Tcheky Karyo) confronts Felix with the black hole of Stephen Hawking proportions in his account, Felix discovers that telephone rates to the Great Beyond are out of this world. Appearing in nearly every shot, Castellitto cuts a likable figure as Felix, whose companion in his increasing misery is a stuffed toy anteater given to him for his son.
A son's unfinished business with his father is expanded — not completely successfully — to embrace key issues in secular Judaism. But, pic works best as a fanciful questioning of how much useful communicating people are actually doing as they become tethered to costly mobile devices. Perhaps the most valuable "communication" doesn't cost a dime.
Joffé gets dandy perfs from entire cast, and Paris looks great. Jazz-meets-klezmer score is a delight.