C+Directed by Joshua Z. Weinstein Starring Menashe Lustig Review by Jon Kissel |  |
There is something so strange and off-putting about the Hasidic community in New York. In the midst of a multicultural metropolis, a cloistered, repressive, and conformist group remains dedicated to staying in a bygone era of vaccine-preventable disease and women informally barred from the workplace. The Amish just come off differently, probably because it makes more sense to be insular in a rural community. The oddness of the Hasidim is on display in Joshua Z. Weinstein’s Menashe, a film about a man on the outside of his community who wants to return to full status. Though Menashe doesn’t sell why that would be the best option for him, it does provide an opportunity for a peek inside a closed-off world.
Menashe Lustig stars as the titular character, and the non-professional actor’s performance is aided by the film’s semi-autobiographical nature. He’s a widower and father to young Rieven (Ruben Niborski), though Hasidic rules dictate that a child of Rieven’s age can’t be raised by an unmarried man. Rieven is instead sheltered by Menashe’s brother-in-law Eizik (Yoel Weisshaus), a humorless man with no patience for the slovenly Menashe. The film finds its lead struggling between submission to rules that would keep his son away from him, ignoring them altogether, or performing the tasks and self-improvements that are required of him to reunite his family.
For a secular, independent, and preternaturally skeptical viewer, there’s a single correct course of action for Menashe. If he’s not going to take it, then the film needs to do a lot of work to sell the value of him sticking around and not simply leaving with Rieven. Weinstein embedded himself in a Brooklyn Hasidic community for years to make Menashe, and based on what he chose to include as background detail, it’s filled with girls who aren’t allowed to go to college and women who function solely as baby-making machines. Menashe’s marriage, never healthy thanks to its arranged nature, demanded children, so his wife took risky fertility treatments that led to her death. Weinstein depicts these social constraints and neglects to show any benefits, possibly because there’s no way to do so that’s not at the expense of the Hasidic women. What value is a cheerful scene of males-only camaraderie when next door, an 18 year old girl is being locked into a marriage?
Further complicating the struggles at the heart of Menashe is the lead’s considerable failures as a father and provider. What Eizik and the other Hasids have correct is that Menashe would have a very difficult time raising his son on his own. A one-room apartment is paid for by a menial job at a grocer and begrudging handouts from Eizik. His grooming is nonexistent. When Rieven does spend time with his father, it’s cake for breakfast and first aid for dinner, on account of poorly hung pictures on the wall. The film sees Menashe as clearly as it sees the Hasidim, but, perhaps in a desire to stick with Lustig’s life, it can’t imagine a way forward that doesn’t involve them.
Menashe is an elemental story of fatherhood built around a complicated and complex community, and Weinstein does a good job of placing the former squarely within the latter. It’s also a film that could only exist from the perspective that it does. There’s no equivalent film called Esther, wherein a widowed Hasidic woman forces herself to get married so she can be reunited with her child. That would be an impossible level of submission to stomach, and it’s a counter-factual that lingers over Menashe. Weinstein is originally a documentarian and this is his first feature. It’s easier for a nonfiction film to sit back and observe without judgment, but it’s next to impossible for a feature to do the same. Here, judgment is unavoidable and it doesn’t land in Menashe’s favor. C+
For a secular, independent, and preternaturally skeptical viewer, there’s a single correct course of action for Menashe. If he’s not going to take it, then the film needs to do a lot of work to sell the value of him sticking around and not simply leaving with Rieven. Weinstein embedded himself in a Brooklyn Hasidic community for years to make Menashe, and based on what he chose to include as background detail, it’s filled with girls who aren’t allowed to go to college and women who function solely as baby-making machines. Menashe’s marriage, never healthy thanks to its arranged nature, demanded children, so his wife took risky fertility treatments that led to her death. Weinstein depicts these social constraints and neglects to show any benefits, possibly because there’s no way to do so that’s not at the expense of the Hasidic women. What value is a cheerful scene of males-only camaraderie when next door, an 18 year old girl is being locked into a marriage?
Further complicating the struggles at the heart of Menashe is the lead’s considerable failures as a father and provider. What Eizik and the other Hasids have correct is that Menashe would have a very difficult time raising his son on his own. A one-room apartment is paid for by a menial job at a grocer and begrudging handouts from Eizik. His grooming is nonexistent. When Rieven does spend time with his father, it’s cake for breakfast and first aid for dinner, on account of poorly hung pictures on the wall. The film sees Menashe as clearly as it sees the Hasidim, but, perhaps in a desire to stick with Lustig’s life, it can’t imagine a way forward that doesn’t involve them.
Menashe is an elemental story of fatherhood built around a complicated and complex community, and Weinstein does a good job of placing the former squarely within the latter. It’s also a film that could only exist from the perspective that it does. There’s no equivalent film called Esther, wherein a widowed Hasidic woman forces herself to get married so she can be reunited with her child. That would be an impossible level of submission to stomach, and it’s a counter-factual that lingers over Menashe. Weinstein is originally a documentarian and this is his first feature. It’s easier for a nonfiction film to sit back and observe without judgment, but it’s next to impossible for a feature to do the same. Here, judgment is unavoidable and it doesn’t land in Menashe’s favor. C+
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