A review of Chez Schwartz by Garry Beitel

Last night I watched the documentary, Chez Schwartz (2007). It’s a film by Garry Beitel, the professor from my Canadian Documentary class at McGill, and a Montreal-based filmmaker who has worked on numerous independent documentaries (often for TeleQuebec) that narrow in on particular communities and individuals. Chez Schwartz is a film about the 75 year-old Montreal landmark, Schwartz’s smoked meat delicatessen on St. Laurent boulevard.

Beitel and his crew filmed at Schwartz’s for a year, collecting footage of the cooks, bussers, and kitchen staff, as well as the long-time regulars and the tourists, and the panhandlers out front, including local animator, Ryan Larkin (the 1994 documentary, Ryan, looked at his life and work in detail).

If I’ve correctly remembered Prof. Beitel’s lectures, Chez Schwartz follows in the tradition of Canadian documentaries like Paul Tomkowicz: Street-railway Switchman, The Days Before Christmas, and Pour la suite du monde (Of Whales, the Moon and Men).

What I mean is that there are no pull backs where we get a narrated backstory about a particular person. We aren’t taken through the mechanical process of preparing smoked meat from cow to plate. (This seems like the modern American style of documentary to me). Instead, we stay with the characters, sometimes over-estimating their ability to give us insight into the inner world of their workplace. But Beitel is concerned with how the myth of Schwartz is built through personal stories, so he lets us hear the ones that we usually don’t encounter, and he doesn’t interrupt us.

At the beginning of the film, the staff act nervously on camera, glancing at us behind the camera (are we ready to order?). By about a third of the way in, most characters have warmed up and some begin giving charmingly cliched performances in their close-face interviews. Luckily, there are an overwhelming number of moments where we’re left to watch the staff and customers move around the cramped set, revealing more about their nature than the interviews alone could provide. At times, the customers and camera crew fade into the background and characters whisper asides to Beitel and his audience, in the same public-private way that the Russian busboy writes poems on napkins while he works.

There are some beautiful human moments and truthful capturings of restaurant life in this film. Chez Schwartz goes beyond the experience of eating a sandwich at the deli and gives us the sense of slowly becoming “a regular” with all the deception and strangeness that that requires. My only dig against the film is that the music was unnecessarily jazzy and cheesy.

Next on my list is “Bonjour! Shalom!“, Beitel’s 1991 examination of Hassidic Jewish/quebecois Francophone co-existence in Montreal’s Outremont neighbourhood.

More info on Garry Beitel.
Visit Beitel’s website.

Incidentally, the NFB CineRobotheque is screening a series of animations in conjunction with Just For Laughs. Watch free short films all week!! (July 10th - 20th) More info.