You can see, hear and feel the strain in the Brazilian comedy “Cheers to Life (Vida a Vida),” the great effort expended to achieve “cute.”

It’s sweet enough, and sweetly sentimental. But for a “finding your (living) roots” story that takes a couple of cousins to Israel to meet a granny they never knew, that’s never quite enough.

So we’ve got to trick granddad Benjamin, whom they’ve never met, lie to him and drug him for a “Weekend at Benjamins” bit. They’ve got to debate whether they’re kissing/copulating cousins, and be as dainty about that as possible. And they’ve got to see the historic sights — the Wailing Wall, Dead Sea, King Solomon’s Mines, etc. — on a Holy Land tour with cute nuns, other tourists and a comically flamboyant Portuguese speaking tour guide.

It’s a competently made film, with flashbacks from the distant past setting up a somewhat cloying story. But the laughs and delights are few and the sentimental finale is contrived and clumsy.

It’s about three heirloom “pendants”(lockets) that “only the bravest women in this family” wear. Decades after she was given one by her mother, who died young, orphaned Jessica (irrepressible Thati Lopes) stumbles across one to match the one her mother gave her.

That’s how she tracks down the “cousin,” Gabriel (Rodrigo Simas), a photographer in the process of being kicked out of his model-girlfriend’s (Aline Dias) apartment. He was selling jewelry, heirlooms included.

They didn’t know they were related, that they have a shared ancestor who fled an arranged marriage and ran off to Israel with her true love. But as both are broke — Jessica is broke enough to “borrow” and pawn jewelry from the antiques store where she works for plane fare — they’ll jet off to meet the mysterious Hava (Regina Braga) and her husband Ben, Brazilian-born tour business owner Ben (Jonas Bloch).

“They’ll think I came here for the money,” Jessica whines. As Jessica and Gabriel have haggled over “inheritance” percentages, “But you came here for the money” (in Portuguese, or dubbed into English) is the only response to that.

They will be fish out of water, trapped with tourists on a “Grandpa Ben” tour, guided by Ramirez Ramirez (Diego Martins), doing everything they can think of to draw the old man owner into the tour so that they can meet him, tell him who they are and meet grandma.

Nude bathing on a no nudity beach in Tel Aviv should do the trick. Ben has to show up to bail them out. But Jessica can’t bring herself to fessing up. Ben is sad. Hava? She’s left boring, trapped in routine Ben.

There’s nothing for it but to “help” Ben find Hava in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Eitat, the Dead Sea or wherever Ben figures she might be.

Lopes gets most of the funny lines — comforting a woman recovering in a hospital with “My dream is to get old and have as many plastic surgeries as you.” She’s a less-than-convincing saleswoman, selling articles in the antiques store by extolling “the nostalgia” of “the ’60s,” before admitting how that decade played out in Brazil.

“Set aside the dictatorship and the many being tortured and murdered” and it was a pretty stylish time, for sure.

There’s tentative chemistry between Lopes and Simas. But that requires us and them to get past the “cousins” thing, and to forget his previous lover was a model.

The movie peaks as Jessica finds herself getting the Bat Mitzvah she never had and learning that The Wailing Wall isn’t for weeping. It’s for “making requests.”

The picture blows the “fish out of water” element of this “journey of discovey,” with “a phony Jew” and a guy who only remembers the Hebrew he needed to get through his Bar Mitzvah finding Portuguese speakers every time they need one. And the travelogue part of the picture is pretty but over-familiar.

The best joke is the one “Palestinian” bit in the picture, the fear of being “sold to a sheikh” on camelback when they get lost near King Solomon’s Mines. But a few others pay off.

It’s still not much of a movie, because really, how many versions of “Hava Nagila” do we need to hear in 100 minutes?

Rating: TV-14, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Thati Lopes, Rodrigo Simas, Diego Martins, Aline Dias, Regina Braga and Jonas Bloch.

Credits: Directed by Cris D’Amato, scripted by Natalia Klein. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40