Let My People Go !
Let My People Go !
| 28 December 2011 (USA)
Let My People Go ! Trailers

Everyone knows that Ruben is Jewish, gay, half-French, half-Finnish, an ungrateful son and disappointing lover, a thief who can’t help himself, and possibly a murderer to boot. The only person who doesn't know who Ruben is is Ruben himself. When he comes to a major turning point in his life, Ruben cannot make up his mind which way to go. Should he follow his people or his heart?

Reviews
Cleveronix A different way of telling a story
Salubfoto It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.
Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.
Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.
jm10701 Let My People Go! is the most delightful movie I've seen in ages. Nicolas Maury is so utterly adorable, so sweetly, innocently, devastatingly sexy, so fascinating to watch every second he's on screen, that I wish he'd already starred in dozens of movies so I could watch them all. Since he hasn't, I'll have to sift through the few in which he has appeared in smaller roles.His seemingly unselfconscious charm makes this whole movie a great joy to watch, and I can't imagine it without him at its heart - but everybody else in it and behind it is so good that I'd give it a try anyway.Maury plays Reuben Steiner (spelled Ruben in the credits), a gay French Jew living in Finland with Teemu, his Finnish husband. His scheme to start a sauna business has failed and he's working as a mailman.A man on his mail route gives him an envelope containing almost 200,000 euro and then appears to drop dead. Teemu gets angry at Ruben for taking the money and kicks him out, so he returns to spend Passover with his highly eccentric but very loving family in Paris.It's a farce, much like a very modern version of a 30s screwball comedy, but all the main characters are so lovable and real that the totally unreal stuff that happens doesn't matter.There are no bad performances (his mother is played by Almodóvar's longtime muse Carmen Maura), no villains in the story except a pig-headed in-law and a couple of snarky cops, but they're negligible. A scene near the end in which the rottweiler-like police chief reads Ruben's love letter (in English) to Teemu over the phone is priceless.A brilliant screenplay (co-written with director Mikael Buch by the divine Christophe Honoré), mostly in French and Finnish with fairly good English subtitles; and an interesting score with songs by Devendra Banhart, Noah and the Whale and others.I rented the movie, but I loved it so much that I've ordered a copy to watch many times over. I can't recommend it highly enough.