Just Like Sarah Bernhardt uses humour and the complex relationship between performance and celluloid to explore sexuality and Jewish identity.
The audience is introduced to a narrator, a talking head, who begins with a monologue telling her story of her meeting with another woman. The story is a possible, if strange narrative, never really giving the whole picture.
The filmmaker correlates the narrator with another, more outwardly theatrical, woman, both are sub-personalities diversely exploring melodramatic behaviour, whilst simultaneously embracing and questioning its potential stereotyping of Jewish Women.
Goldwater draws on her childhood memory of being compared to the infamous French actress of this century, Sarah Bernhardt – known for her swooning and tantrums, as well as the considerable anti-semitism levelled against her, and her fine performances.
Bernhardt’s legacy sits alongside the filmmaker’s personal biography of growing up in a ‘Gants Hill, London’ environment – expressed using spaces, vacuums, and the very specific sites/references. Just Like Sarah Bernhardt is an account of the pain and joy attached to one’s own melodramatic behaviour and shifts myths surrounding contemporary Jewish experience.
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