The halachic Catholic: meet a Jew whose made a funny film about his baptism

In a long-gone episode of Coronation Street, Vera Duckworth goes to church. Gravel-voiced, bubble-permed Vera is not a natural worshipper, but her concern for her friend, the pious Ivy, emboldens her to seek audience with the Almighty. “God,” she says, “You don’t know me. But I think you know Ivy?’”

Across the globe, the collision of the worldly and the holy provides a rich vein of comedy, one mined to success by Moroccan-Canadian-French stand-up Gad Elmaleh, whose film Stay With Us converts his own spiritual struggles into a smart, cute tale of homecoming and fresh hope.

The opening nods towards that familiar trope: the son arriving home with a heavy secret. What transcends stereotype is a trinity of things: the story is true (-ish), the troubled boychik is in his fifties, and the secret is a statuette of the Virgin Mary. He has it in his luggage, because: a) films need visuals and b) this Sephardi stand-up has a sincere desire to be baptised a Catholic.

This family-flipping dilemma is worked to full comic potential. When Gad (played by Gad) returns home to Paris, Père et Mère Elmaleh (see above) discover the statuette in their son’s luggage, and almost drop it in horror. Because you’re used to this type of scene, you’re laughing ironically, too: it could have been a gun in the bag, heroin, pornography… But is this worse?

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Interfaith: Gad in another scene from the film (Photo: Laura Gilli)

It would be wrong to suggest, though, that Elmaleh (with co-writer Benjamin Charbit) has turned a serious choice into a simple caper. There are some hard conversations, like the tense Shabbat dinner where Gad’s shocked mother says, “If you change your God, then change your parents and get adopted.”

When we spoke, Gad told me she’d improvised this line, thinking of ways in which she might react, if his baptism plans were true.

Which, however, they were. He also told me he’d presented the issue of baptism and a film about baptism cautiously.

“My parents didn’t really know what they were going to play. I didn’t trick them, but I just said, ‘Ah, it’s a little thing about identity, religion.

“To avoid them saying ‘No. We won’t do this movie’, I wasn’t that precise.

“Throughout our conversation, I was juggling two questions at a time. Because conversion and seeking baptism are one thing.

“But making a film about them, a comedy, no less, with you playing you and the people most affected by your decision pretending to be themselves, well, that is very different.

“Of course there’s lots of personal stuff,” adds Gad. “But I am the director of a movie [looking for] character and subject and theme. And I found it in this story, and everything that I’d been experiencing.”

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Gad Elmaleh (Photo: Laura Gilli)