IN ”Judy Berlin,” debut director Eric Mendelsohn goes slouching toward Babylon, L.I. – and won’t diss suburbia. Call it un-”Happiness.” The Edie Falco-Madeline Kahn charmer earned the South Shore native Best Director honors at Sundance and a coveted opening-night slot at New Directors/New Films.
”It’s too easy to be sarcastic about suburbia. It lets a lot of people off the hook from self-examination,” Mendelsohn told The Post. The brown-eyed, stubble-chinned director resembles and talks like Jon Lovitz’s younger, better-educated brother.
”Somehow the idea is that you grow up in a little town, and then you move to do the real thing that you’re going to do when you grow up. But I don’t believe that. I love suburbia.”
The SUNY-Purchase grad entered the film biz as an assistant costume designer on Woody Allen’s ”Bullets Over Broadway,” among others.
While ”Berlin” is black-and-white and Jewish humor all over, that’s where similarities with Allen end. The story of one momentous day in Babylon – when hope is reborn for an ensemble of quirky characters – is embracing, not critical.
Mendelsohn knows that his bittersweet celebration of Long Island’s local heroes is unfashionable. Where are the guns, the incest and the rage? While youthful international filmmakers are stretching the boundaries of shock cinema in films like ”Happiness,” ”I Stand Alone,” and the New Directors buzz flick ”Sitcom,” Mendelsohn embraces his characters.
Preferring Jacques Demy over Quentin Tarantino, Mendelsohn acknowledges that, working in a whimsical, humanistic vein, ”you don’t grab the [audience] by the back of the head and throw them in a pool of their own blood and say … here’s what we’ve done. You don’t shock people.”
And shock sells. ”Berlin” still needs theatrical distribution. ”We knew we were taking a chance,” said the writer-director. Take a chance on a new director for New York’s ordinary heroes, the people Mendelsohn recognizes ”just for getting through every day, for getting on the A train, for dealing with the cable man.”
