LATE MARRIAGE ***

CAST: Lior Ashkenazi, Ronit Elkabetz, Moni Moshonov, Lili Kosashvili

DIRECTOR: Dover Kosashvili

When the groom slips away from his bride at the wedding celebration, enters the men's room, steps up to the urinal, scrutinizes the equipment of the man next to him and says, "That's a nice dick you've got there," you sense the evening will not end well. Especially when the man at the next urinal is the groom's father.

This is just one sign that what we have here in Israeli director Dover Kosashvili's amusing--but more often harrowing--debut feature is no ordinary wedding and no ordinary family flick. For starters, Zaza (Lior Ashkenazi), a handsome agnostic working toward his PhD, doesn't love his insipid new wife; he loves and probably always will love Judith (Ronit Elkabetz), the free-spirited, truly hot divorcee and single mom whom his rabidly traditional Georgian emigre parents have maligned, threatened with a deadly weapon, and all but booted out of Tel Aviv.

What choice did they have, after all? Their son was scandalously single at the age of 31, and the woman he was shagging on the sly was not only a divorced mother, but she was also Moroccan. And, worst of all, she was 34. Despite their steely insistence--and the entreaties of their narrow-minded emigre friends--that he stick to his own kind, Zaza can keep neither his mind nor his hands off Judith. (In truth, their nude, lengthy and extremely energetic lovemaking is as steamy as anything coming out of Hollywood these days.)

Occasionally, the scenes depicting the harassment of Judith by Zaza's parents (played with scary conviction by Moni Moshonov and Lili Kosashvili, the director's real-life mother) are clumsily staged, bordering uncomfortably on burlesque. Still, Kosashvili and his striking leads have created something special here, a deceptively simple story that is sexy, funny, sad and cleverly disorienting.

So why did this good son come on to his own father in the men's room? As it turns out, it had nothing to do with sex, and everything to do with pride, prejudice and psychological rape. And getting even.