ORTHODOX JEWS | Big Apple Reviews

THE OTHER STORY – movie review

Posted on June 23, 2019 by harveycritic

THE OTHER STORY
Strand Releasing
Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten
Director: Avi Nesher
Screenwriter: Avi Nesher, Noam Shpancer
Cast: Maayan Blum, Maya Dagan, Sasson Gabai, Nathan Goshen, Avigail Harari, Sean Mongoza
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 5/3/19
Opens: June 28, 2019

The Other Story (2018)

When Israel was born in 1948, there was much joy outside the Arab world. Jews both in Israel and around the world rejoiced, but in addition so did most governments and people in the industrialized world. “They made the desert bloom” was the watchword when Jews cultivated what was then a barren land. The kibbutz was a popular kind of work on collective farms, and democratic socialism was the norm in a society that surprisingly enough was mostly secular. Problems arose later after wars that were forced on the tiny state, and the country expanded its borders into territories formerly inhabited only by Palestinians. Let’s not forget, though, that Israelis are today not a unified people where everyone thinks alike, any more than are Americans nowadays. The ultra-religious including the Hasidic sects have grown in population and influence. As a result there is conflict between the religious Jews and the secular majority, the former imposing its will by its voting bloc in the Knesset, or parliament.

Two camps exist to this day: the ultra-religious have been able to ban public buses on the Sabbath and to run Mea Shearim, a neighborhood in Jerusalem, as though it were an independent state. Their influence is considered undemocratic by the secular society. You could barely imagine that a secular Jewish woman would get together with an ultra-orthodox man in marriage, and for the most part the two groups are almost never romantically involved. In the rare cases when they are, however, the sparks fly within the families, which is good, because without sparks, there is no drama.

Now Avi Nesher, who has an impressive résumé as producer, writer, actor and director including his direction of such movies as “The Matchmaker” (teenager’s relationship with a matchmaker who survived the Holocaust) and “Turn Left at the End of the World” (a family from India moves into a desert neighborhood in southern Israel). His “The Other Story” is an involving and often riveting story featuring two plots that merge seamlessly, the principal one being the more absorbing tale while the other is more melodramatic, even off-the-wall. Both plots center on women who are rebelling against their upbringings. Anat Abadi (Joy Rieger) is your typical product of dysfunction having seen his father, Yonatan (Yuval Segal), a psychologist, all too rarely since her parents divorced and he moved to the U.S. Nor is love lost between Yonatan and his successful real estate agent wife Tali (Maya Dagan). He returns to Tali after getting an urgent message: their daughter, who has thrown off her secular upbringing and is now Orthodox, is set to marry Shachar (Nathan Goshen), also a drug-addicted secular musician who introduced his fiancé to drugs and now denies that he is an addict.

At the same time, Shlomo (Sasson Gabai) is playing host to his son Yonatan. Both are psychologists. Shlomo is treating a couple on the verge of breaking up. Rami (Maayan Blum) accuses his wife Sari (Avigail Harari) of threatening the safety of their young son Izi, as a member of a feminist cult given over to worshiping idols and having occult ceremonies that recall Stanley Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut.” She ultimately will rely on the testimony of both Yonatan and Anat regarding both a kidnapping charge and their opinion that the occult ceremonies are not endangering her son’s safety.

“The Other Story” is the name of a song, but it refers as well to the other story of both Yonatan, who has been involved in criminal dealings in the U.S., and the situations of the two young women rebelling against the conformity their families represent and, on a greater level, the impositions of the patriarchal society. The principal conflict, though, pits young Anat against the horror that her parents feel at the idea that their daughter has voluntarily upended her free life to become an Orthodox Jew. This conflict mirrors that troubles that all of Israel goes through nowadays, the religious Jews generally siding with their current prime minister in favor of expanding the country into the West Bank, while the secular Jews generally favor a peace with the Palestinians based on two societies living side by side.

The film is welcome both as a primer to people of all religions who are open to educating themselves to the schisms within such a small country, and an indictment of those who side with one point of view to such an extent that they cannot understand the rationality of the other. As such, it mirrors the split in our own country between Republican and Democrats, right and left, and splits within the parties as well.

In Hebrew with English subtitles.

Story – B+
Acting – A-
Technical –B+
Overall – B+

DISOBEDIENCE – movie reveiw

Posted on April 22, 2018 by harveycritic

DISOBEDIENCE

Bleecker Street
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten
Director: Sebastián Lelio
Screenwriter: Sebastián Lelio, Rebecca Lenkiewicz Based on the novel by Naomi Alderman
Cast: Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams, Alessandro Nivola
Screened at: Dolby88, NYC, 4/17/18
Opens: April 27, 2018

Sociologists like Robert Putnam’s whose book “Bowling Alone” deals with the deterioration of community life in America have their theories seconded just this month of April by Jonah Goldberg of National Review magazine and David Brooks of the New York Times. They assert that our society has become atomized: that with the proliferation of TV channels, the indulging of hundreds of Facebook friends whom you may never even see and speak with in person, leave us lonely and depressed. During the hippie days of the late sixties and early seventies some people tried a different way of live in communes as did the utopian communities in the 19th century. If you want to see genuine community life today, however, as a contrast to current theories, you could find it among Hasidic Jews and in many cases ultra-Orthodox Jews, who live in insular societies, teach fellow Jews or serve as merchants to their own religious folks, and rarely mix in the outside world. If this sounds claustrophobic to you, remember that these spiritual and highly religious people have with few exceptions maintained their insularity and so far as what outside societies can see they are happy. They are not atomized.

But what about the few renegades who cannot abide by such restricted lives? Think of Deborah Feldman whose book “Unorthodox: the Scandalous Rejection of Hasidic Roots,” led to an enraged response among the people she left when she moved to New York’s Greenwich Village. Now the Orthodox community we find in Chilean director Sebastián Lelio’s film probably seems to us in the audience to be not only closely knit but pretty pleased with the way they live. One clue to their well being is that only one woman chooses to break out of the London neighborhood and move to New York to pursue a career as a hip photographer . She’s still Jewish, but she’s not about ever to return to her roots where she would be expected to marry whether the relationship is loveless or not and to have sex every Friday night among other rituals, whether she was in the mood of not.

In “Disobedience,” we are given a close examination of three people who grew up as friends but whose lives are changed probably forever when one woman leaves the nest and is shunned by others in the congregations. As a bonus, we also see services in the synagogue, listening to the harmonic tones of a choir and the wisdom of two sermons. As a special treat we are in the presence of
three special performers, also directed with a crescendo of power that takes us from quie t talks around the Sabbath table to a verbal explosion that show how the repressions built up for months and years are sudden let out.

After Rav Kruschka, the rabbi of a London ultra-Orthodox congregation drops dead while giving a sermon about our fundamental choice to live like the angels or like the beasts, his daughter Ronit (Rachel Weisz), who had left the congregation and her immediate family some time back to pursue a secular career in New York, returns for the funeral. Some, like her childhood friend Dovid (Alessandro Nivola) are not pleased to see her and greet her with a mechanical “I hope you have a long life.” On the other hand, Dovid’s wife Esti (Rachel McAdams) is overjoyed. During the time that Ronit stays in the home of Dovid and Esti, the sexual attraction between her and Esti is revived, hinting that Ronit may have been pressured out of the community when some kissing between the two women was discovered. Since you can’t easily defeat nature, the two carry on but are caught kissing once again by neighbors (imagine if they witnessed an entire, graphic lovemaking scene between the two women)! By contrast Esti, whose sexual scene with her husband involves no foreplay, the two covered by a blanket. Esti must choose to remain in her marriage, and in effect whether to remain at all with the greater family of religious men and women.

The film is shown without flashbacks but rather with a conventional style that belies the unconventional manner of the two women. As a retired teacher, I was particularly impressed with the lovely classes taught by both Esti in a religious school and Dovit, around a table where sections of the bible are interpreted.

The conclusion is both heartbreaking and wonderful, a testament to the solid performances of all three principals, with scenes from the choir at the religious service so enchanting that Gentiles in the audience may wish to convert.

With this film, director Lelio’s place among the great Latin-American directors is assured, a man whose “A Fantastic Woman,” dealing with a transgender waitress who works as a night-club singer, confirms his predilection for films with renegades.

Story – B+
Acting – A-
Technical – B+
Overall – B+

THY FATHER’S CHAIR – movie review

Posted on March 24, 2018 by harveycritic

THY FATHER’S CHAIR

No Permits Produktions
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten
Director: Àlex Lora, Antonio Tibaldi,
Cast: Abraham, Shraga, Hanan
Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 3/23/18
Opens: In Theaters Oct. 13, 2017. Available on VOD March 30, 2018.

When you really dislike a film, perhaps the worst insult you can throw its way is that “it’s like watching paint dry.” How about a film that’s about a crew’s cleaning out a filthy house in Brooklyn? It’s tempting to say the same, but Spaniard Àlex Lora and Australian Antonio Tibali deliver a documentary that at first appears like an instructional film for house cleaning trainees. However given the rich conversations that they evoke while at the same time avoiding interviews, often the worst part of documentaries, they give us a rich, fly-on-the-wall look at two brothers, Abraham and Shraga, who worship in a Hasidic synagogue though not quite Haredim themselves. Whether we come out of the brief seventy-five minutes understanding why this pair have filled their inherited home with the detritus of years is debatable. I’m guessing that since their mom and dad died, they did not want to lose memories of their beloved parents. This may explain why they kept the books intact, though some were not picked up in years (a set was upside down). But why keep stuff that they picked up during the past months and years including trash bags from the supermarket, bedbug-infested mattresses, crumbling newspapers, and sour milk, plus some strange mixture in a pot, all of which smelled to high heaven (perhaps not the best word to describe it) as did their rooms?

In fact the twins, especially the more highlighted Abraham (two minutes younger than Shraga), call a professional clean-up crew when their upstairs tenants threaten a rent strike, complaining about the stench and maybe about the pereginating roaches that they would inevitably inherit if they had not already been so visited. Like the stereotypical little old ladies who fill their homes with cats, Abraham and Shraga have the neshama to open their abode to the lucky felines, who did not seem to mind the filth and stench at all. In fact in the movie’s most ironic scene, one of the nameless kitties spends her entire screen time cleaning herself on one of the several mattresses that the brothers had collected.

Abraham sports a huge gray beard and speaks English throughout without a trace of a Yiddish accent (there’s a touch of Brooklynese in some of the words, though), even chatting with his brother in English. He is of course fluent in Hebrew, delivering an all-too-brief, mellifluous concert from a Jewish scroll. Yet while Hanan, the Israeli head of the cleaning agency, professes his atheism, he is probably be surprised that Abraham, with all the trapping of Orthodoxy, labeled himself agnostic. He uses the word “God” two or three times, a practice considered taboo outside the synagogue by Orthodox Jews, who refer to the Deity instead as “Hashem” or “Adoshem.”

You of course know the directors from their movie “Godka Circa,” a ten-minute look at one Alifa, who looks up at the Somai sky, contemplating her life as a shepherdess, and knowing that some time soon, her life will change. The theme is obviously present in “Thy Father’s Chair,” since the brothers are about to embark on a new phase of their lives.

Hanan, who invades the house, finding the toilet packed with schmutz (probably not kept so in remembrance of the occupants’ parents), works with an a group of understanding Black employees, who take a week, maybe more, turning out a spacious abode that portends a new beginning for the brothers. Or does it?

Story – B
Acting – B+
Technical – B
Overall – B