Love Comes Lately

After finding few venues outside of film festivals to screen his splendid 2001 short film “Old Love” (based on the story by Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer), German director Jan Schütte (Drachenfutter) expanded it to feature length, incorporating two more of Singer’s seminal stories (“Alone” and “The Briefcase”). Feisty octogenarian Otto Tausig plays Austrian émigré Max Cohn, a Manhattan-based short-story writer. Like Frank Langella’s Leonard Schiller in Starting Out in the Evening (but with a far more active libido), Max (along with his fictive alter egos) engages in a series of relationships with younger women (Elizabeth Peña, Barbara Hershey) that blur fiction and reality. Given the film’s genesis, it’s unsurprising that Singer’s spirit is best captured during the segment (featuring the wonderful Tova Feldshuh) culled from “Old Love,” but Singer’s fear of impotence and death remains deftly woven into the dreamlike patchwork of Schütte’s narrative. Kendall Square | 86 minutes