Cover of Love Comes Lately

In the 2008 Love Comes Lately, three Isaac Singer stories merge to make one humorous but dark movie, an English-language concoction written and directed by Germany’s Jan Schutte.

The film centers on an elderly Jewish fiction writer, Max (Otto Tausig), whose longtime girlfriend (Rhea Perlman) neurotically fails him with her jealousy, while he fails her by going to bed with Barbara Hershey‘s Rosalie.  Through such vignettes Schutte exhibits human beings as a race of lonely sinners, and in fact two of the movie’s Jews, Max and Rosalie, are said by Rosalie to “belong to the same tribe—the one that’s destroying itself” (a Singer line?).  The film doesn’t wholly work because it intermittently dramatizes Max’s writing—with Elizabeth Pena playing a complete creature of imagination—thus giving it the same pictorial weight that the story of the old writer has.  Still, it is meaningful, thought-provoking, and engaging.