{"id":6628,"date":"2014-08-22T00:11:48","date_gmt":"2014-08-22T07:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/?p=6628"},"modified":"2014-08-27T19:59:24","modified_gmt":"2014-08-28T02:59:24","slug":"elan-mastai-taps-family-history-for-f-word","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/2014\/08\/22\/elan-mastai-taps-family-history-for-f-word\/","title":{"rendered":"Elan Mastai taps family history for F Word"},"content":{"rendered":"

Zoe Kazan and Daniel Radcliffe on the red carpet in New York City. (photo from facebook.com\/thewhatifmovie\/photos_stream<\/a>)<\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

When Elan Mastai\u2019s father said hello to a pretty stranger in a Jerusalem caf\u00e9 some four decades ago, it was the only English word he knew.<\/p>\n

She was born in Chicago and grew up in Vancouver, and had lived in London the previous few years before trekking to Israel to explore her Jewish heritage and teach English, of all things.<\/p>\n

It worked out pretty well for both of them. They relocated to Vancouver, got married and started a family. Now, their 39-year-old son has channeled their youthful bravado into his screenplay for What If<\/em>, a warm and refreshingly grounded romantic comedy that opens in as-of-yet-unspecifed Canadian cities Aug. 22 with its original title, The F Word<\/em> (F as in friend).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea of moving to a country where I didn\u2019t speak the language, different legal system, different everything, and having to start my life from scratch, it\u2019s almost impossible for me to imagine doing that,\u201d Mastai said in an interview. \u201cBut that\u2019s what my father did. And he did it for love. That is a big part of the kind of things I like to write. I think in my DNA are the things that people do for love. And that\u2019s all over this movie.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film imagines just-dumped Daniel Radcliffe meeting Zoe Kazan at a party, only to learn that she\u2019s in a serious, long-term relationship. Say, there\u2019s no reason they can\u2019t be friends, right? It just requires a little honesty on his part and a lot of clarity on her part.<\/p>\n

If only things were that simple, well, there\u2019d be no movie. The film has great fun poking and prodding the central characters until one of them takes a leap of faith \u2013 and a transatlantic flight \u2013 that results in nothing I can reveal here.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a>
Screenwriter Elan Mastai (photo from thefinaltake.com<\/a>)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cI love the romantic comedy, but it can sometimes be a bit of a debased genre because it\u2019s a very phony genre at times,\u201d Mastai said on the phone from Toronto, where he lives with his wife and children. \u201cThe ones I love \u2013 and they\u2019re the ones that most people love \u2013 have something real and relatable to say about human interaction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mastai\u2019s childhood was happily marked by a Shabbat dinner every Friday night, where his large family would convene and debate the issues of the day. Everyone had strong ideas of right and wrong, but there was plenty of grey to debate, as well.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn my personal heritage, I had all the different versions of the Jewish experience in the 20th and 21st century,\u201d Mastai explained. \u201cWhether it\u2019s American Jews, European Jewry, Sephardic, the beginning of Israel, it was all literally sitting around my dinner table when I was growing up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Notably, the travails his grandparents had survived did not mitigate their sense of humor. \u201cTo me, the sensibility at the core of the film is very Jewish in terms of that legacy of Jewish humor, whether it\u2019s Billy Wilder or Woody Allen or Nora Ephron or Charlie Kaufman or William Goldman,\u201d Mastai said. \u201cWit and humor as a tool to defuse awkwardness and tension, and that prizing of intelligence, and the prizing of ethical behavior \u2013 these are things that were part of my Jewish upbringing, and I tried to bring those to the characters.\u201d<\/p>\n

We may think that a successful screenwriter, more than anything, must have a fabulous imagination. Mastai\u2019s triumphantly demonstrates in What If\/The F Word<\/em> that heart and intelligence are sufficient to engage an audience in the romantic travails of a couple of ordinary people.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the way through it, I wanted to write what I thought of as an ethical romantic comedy,\u201d<\/p>\n

Mastai confided. \u201cA comedy where people aren\u2019t making these crazy, cockamamie schemes or twisting the truth or hiding things from each other. Everybody\u2019s trying to do the right thing. That feels very Jewish to me because of how I was raised, that you can try to do the right thing, try to make ethical decisions, and still make a total mess of your life. Because that\u2019s the way life is.\u201d<\/p>\n

Michael Fox<\/strong> is a San Francisco film critic and journalist<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Zoe Kazan and Daniel Radcliffe on the red carpet in New York City. (photo from facebook.com\/thewhatifmovie\/photos_stream) When Elan Mastai\u2019s father said hello to a pretty stranger in a Jerusalem caf\u00e9 some four decades ago, it was the only English word he knew. She was born in Chicago and grew up in Vancouver, and had lived […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6598,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[787],"tags":[1779,1776,1777,1778,1780],"class_list":["post-6628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tv-film","tag-daniel-radcliffe","tag-elan-mastai","tag-the-f-word","tag-what-if","tag-zoe-kazan"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6628\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}