’Tango’ a dance of love, family, religion

What it means to be a Jew in modern-day Europe after decades of liberalism and intermarriage is the subject of "The Rashevski Tango," a 2003 coproduction and another real find by speciality distributor Menemsha Films ("The Ritchie Boys").
Dolfo Rashevski (Natan Cogan), the film’s irreligious patriarch and death camp survivor, returns to Belgium from Israel where he burped in his rabbi brother’s face as a gesture of disdain. The family is grieving after the death of its matriarch Rosa (Laurence Masliah), Dolfo’s sister-in-law.
She was the family tango enthusiast and linchpin. Family friend Antoine (Hippolyte Giradot), meanwhile, wishes to court the vivacious Nina (Tania Garbaski), Rosa’s granddaughter. But Nina wishes to marry a fellow Jew. Antoine offers to convert, but as a rabbi points out, he would then be more Jewish than Nina since her mother Isabelle (Ludmila Mikael) is not a Jew. The radiant Isabelle, it is true, has never felt completely accepted by the Jewish family into which she married, even though her husband Simon (Michel Jonasz), a merchant who has Wagner’s "Ride of the Valkyries" as his ringtone, is a virtual atheist who wouldn’t know a kaddish from a radish.
Meanwhile, Ric Rashevski (Rudi Rosenberg), who served in the Israeli army, proposes to the beautiful Khadija (Selma Kouchy), a Belgian of Arab descent. She has refused Ric, for now.
As all of this should demonstrate, it’s often hard to know who is a Jew and who is not. As someone points out, some survivors of the camps gave up on religion afterward, while others embraced Judaism even more fervently. Religion is a tricky subject, but it is handled with subtlety, charm and, in final scenes, real elegiac power by director/co-writer Sam Garbarski and his first-rate cast. Don’t sit this "Tango" out.