One of the sweetest movies you’ll ever watch, the charming romantic comedy Like A Fish Out of Water follows out-of-work, immigrant actor Marcello and his beautiful Hebrew teacher Anat through a series of comic misadventures that draw the seemingly mismatched pair closer together. Desperate to improve his Hebrew accent in order to land an audition for a soap opera in Israel, Marcello begs Anat for help. But she has her own problems to deal with, namely her pesky mother who’s obsessed with marrying her off to a good Jewish man. Little does she know she may have already found him.

“This is so important to me,” Marcello pleads with Anat, begging her to help him practice his lines for the audition after class, “an actor without work is like a fish out of water!” What Marcello doesn’t realize yet is that a man without the woman that he loves is equally as lost.

Marcello and Anat both know that love is hard to find—so they’ve decided not to look. For Anat, dating has become a chore because she’s unimpressed by the suitors her mother finds for her. Marcello, on the other hand, is a widower, and has dedicated himself solely to his daughter, Lucy, after the death of his wife. Teasing Lucy as he lowers her down from a piggy-back ride, Marcello tells her he doesn’t need a woman because, “I already have one breaking my back.” But, though they get off to a rocky start, it’s only a matter of time before Anat sees through Marcello’s lousy luck and foolish antics and falls in love with the goofy, warm-hearted father.

As in any worthy romantic comedy, Marcello does not make a good first impression on Anat. He was only trying to charm her, but Anat ends up thinking he’s a liar and a playboy. She’s convinced that tutoring him after class is some sort of scheme he’s come up with to try to seduce her — and she’s too smart for that. Interrupting his pleading and apologizing, Anat snaps at him, saying, “I hate soap operas. They’re stupid and trashy.”

But attraction has a will of its own. Despite what Anat’s mother seems to believe, it can’t be orchestrated or controlled, and sometimes total opposites attract. Marcello might not be what Anat had in mind for herself (he’s an immigrant, not religious, already has a child, and he’s struggling to find work), but, against her better judgment, Anat is willing to forgive all their differences, which takes even her by surprise.

When she looks closely at her own parent’s relationship, however, Anat realizes that she grew up with proof that opposites can balance each other out. While her couch potato father takes in his daily does of trashy television, her excitable mother buzzes through the house preparing for the company that she’s just invited over. “You two are so different,” Anat mutters to herself with her eyes glazed in thought, thinking of Marcello.

Marcello’s moment of epiphany comes while lounging in his living room. When he looks over at the couch and sees Anat and Lucy enamored with each other and giggling together, he realizes just how special Anat really is.

Marcello and Anat’s simple little love affair is quickly complicated by a series of well-intentioned lies that slip out of control. The film comes to comedic climax when Marcello, Lucy, Rosa the neighbor woman, and the little old French man from down the street have to remember all the lies they’ve told and pretend to be a family in order to get through Sabbath dinner with Anat’s parents without a catastrophe.

Sabbath dinner isn’t the first time that Marcello’s nerves have made him botch things with Anat. If he’s not blubbering like an idiot around her, he’s told a good-intentioned lie that’s put them both into a sticky situation, or he’s done something to cross the line of their friendship.

But his romance-obsessed daughter, full of forgiveness for her father, excuses his foolish behavior: “Romeo always gets confused when he’s talking to Juliette,” she assures him. It may not be true, but it’s the charming white lie on which most romantic comedies, including the irresistible Like A Fish Out of Water, are based.