Adam Levy (Jesse Aaron Dwyre), an 18-year old Orthodox Jew, and Yasmine Gibran (Flavia Bechara), a young Lebanese Christian woman, fall in love in Montreal in the film Adam's Wall. (Ziad Touma/Equinoxe Films)

In the Montreal love story Adam’s Wall, an 18-year-old musician named Adam yearns to connect with his adored Yasmine. In what is perhaps the film’s most erotic scene, Adam is sitting on Yasmine’s bed, a scratchy Mozart record playing in the background. Softly, he embraces her forearm as if playing the clarinet. She brings her fingers to his lips, then turns away. Both seem desperate to go further, but don’t.

Adam's Wall is a fresh and intimate look at two cultures that rarely break through in Quebec’s predominantly francophone popular media: religious Jews and the Lebanese.

Adam (Jesse Aaron Dwyre) is an intense but gentle Orthodox Jewish boy, while Yasmine (played by Beirut’s Flavia Bechara) is a young Lebanese Christian woman. At one point in the film, Adam’s grandfather calls Yasmine “an Arab girl,” before driving her from the apartment he shares with his grandson. She, in turn, calls him a Nazi. Jasmine’s father is similarly shocked when she brings a Jew home for tea.

This Montreal take on a well-worn formula is a fresh and intimate look at two cultures that rarely break through in Quebec’s predominantly francophone popular media: religious Jews and the Lebanese. There are more people in Montreal of Lebanese background than in any other city in Canada, while Quebec’s Jewish population is one of the oldest and biggest in North America.

“Usually we get along, but sometimes tribalism comes to the surface,” says Montreal-born Dana Schoel, a secular Jew who conceived the story. She co-wrote the script with director Michael Mackenzie, the acclaimed Montreal playwright behind The Baroness and the Pig. He also co-wrote Robert Lepage’s film Le Polygraphe (1996).

The 34-year-old Schoel was inspired to write Adam’s Wall while studying at Concordia University in 2002, during the so-called “Concordia riots,” when a protest against a campus visit by former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu turned violent. “There was a lot of tension and hostility between the Jewish student group and the Palestinians on campus,” says Schoel. “I observed how events far away can affect the lives and behaviour of people living here. I wanted to write about that.”

Adam’s Wall is set in Montreal’s Mile End neighbourhood, which became a flashpoint for tensions between the district’s large Hasidic Jewish community and their secular neighbours last year. The local YMCA frosted its windows so Hasidic boys in the neighbouring synagogue couldn’t watch women doing Pilates in tight gym clothes. A few female Y members took up a petition, claiming the community centre was bowing to pressure from Jewish fundamentalists.

Adam and Yasmine listen to records belonging to Adam's deceased parents in Adam's Wall. (Ziad Touma/Equinoxe Films)

Adam lives in a typically dark and narrow Mile End apartment where he is oppressed by walls lined with ancient religious texts and his conservative grandfather’s rigid morality. With his sweet formality and adolescent awkwardness, Adam seems to be from another century. Dwyre is a skilled physical actor and expresses Adam’s overwhelming affection for Yasmine by constantly bumping into things.

Newly arrived from Beirut, the confident and exotic Yasmine appears to be the typical Montreal girl, but clearly is not. When she tells Adam she moved to Canada from Lebanon to escape, he naively asks, “From what”?

To which she replies: “Oh, you know: bombs, invasions, the usual stuff.”

The third character in this story is the city itself. While foreign directors often transform Montreal into an anonymous American or European burgh, Adam’s Wall captures the wintry and melancholic soul of this centuries-old city, with its snow-covered streets, endless blocks of grey limestone houses and overcast sky to match. On their first date, Adam takes Yasmine up “the Mountain ” [as Mount Royal is known to locals] and then later to watch the ice floes in the fast-moving and frigid St. Lawrence River.

“I wanted to create a cinematic space for Montreal,” says Schoel. “In the way, perhaps, that Woody Allen did for New York.”

“This story could only happen here,” Mackenzie says over a coffee in Mile End, where he lived for many years after coming to Canada from London three decades ago. “Montreal is an incredible city. It’s surrounded by this massive river and wilderness, yet it has the density of a European city.”

Montreal’s winter heaviness is a fitting backdrop to this love story. Yasmine and Adam, along with their families, are weighed down by history, tragedy and the current Middle East crisis. Partway through the film, Yasmine’s mother, a journalist, goes missing after bombs are dropped on Lebanon. And the whole reason Adam lives with his grandfather is that he was orphaned after his parents were shot on a trip to the West Bank a decade before. Shortly after their death, Adam hid a suitcase of their records at the base of a crumbling wall in Mount Royal Park — a place Yasmine later compares to the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

Despite the ideological distance imposed by their respective cultures, these two characters have extraordinary on-screen chemistry, which is a testament to both Bechara's and Dwyre’s acting and Mackenzie’s skill as a director.

Director and screenwriter Micheal MacKenkie on the set of Adam's Wall. (Ziad Touma/Equinoxe Films)

All the performances are strong: Quebec’s Gabriel Gascon, whose first language is French, has perfected a Yiddish accent to play Adam’s grandfather, the physically imposing and at times terrifyingly angry patriarch Rabbi Levy. Paul Ahmarani (Congorama) does a similarly excellent job of portraying Yasmine’s distrustful father, Najeeb.

Made for only $1 million, Adam’s Wall is something of a miracle. It got no support from Telefilm Canada, the main body that funds feature films in this country. It was Telefilm’s Quebec equivalent, Société de developpement des enterprises culturelles (SODEC), which came through with the cash to get this lovely picture made. The production values are high, due largely to François Dutil’s exquisite cinematography and Anne Pritchard’s thoughtful production design. The music of Benoît Charest and Polaris Prize winner Patrick Watson deftly weaves ancient sounds with contemporary dreaminess.

Released in Quebec in October, Adam’s Wall has enjoyed terrific reviews and, during its opening week, it made more money per screen than big-buzz pictures Passchendaele or Blindness. But as is the case with so many Canadian flicks, Adam’s Wall isn’t likely to get much of a chance to succeed at the box office. It opened in Toronto on Dec. 5, but is slated to run for only a week; its Vancouver release date remains up in the air.

The limited exposure is unfortunate. Produced by two up-and-coming Montreal filmmakers — Lebanese-born Ziad Touma (Saved By the Belles, Webdreams) and Olivier Sirois — Adam’s Wall is both artful and mainstream, a combination that is hard to achieve, and one that cultural bureaucrats have been obsessed with for years.

Adam’s Wall opened in Toronto on Dec. 5.

Patricia Bailey is a writer and broadcaster based in Montreal.