A-Directed by Emil Ben-Shimon Starring Evelin Haegol, Yigal Naor, and Aviv Alush Review by Jon Kissel |  |
A charming Israeli comedy that teaches the viewer more about Judaism than nine seasons of Seinfeld, The Women’s Balcony illustrates the dramatic differences between a five on the religious conservatism scale and a nine. Emil Ben-Shimon’s superb debut is well-versed in the seductive power of charismatic leaders and the creeping language of repression while also being warm and funny. Assemble a minyan and be taken in by one of the best films to ever come out of Israel.
The film’s community of orthodox Jews, shown as close-knit and bustling in its first scenes, is thrown into chaos by the collapse of the titular area. After the dust has settled and the injured are treated, what’s left is an unusable synagogue and a frail old rabbi who’s been made comatose by the stress of the incident. The men of the temple desperately reach out to the young, vital, and temple-less Rabbi David (Aviv Alush) for leadership, and David gives it to them in exchange for gentle cajoling into turning up the gender segregation dial. Marriages are instantly divided between pliant husbands and resistant wives, and everyone is forced to choose sides.
The film rests between a version of religion that is acceptable and community-building and one that is everything the Dawkins’ and the Harris’ of the world despise with its patronizing misogyny and its elevation of trinkets over good works. The committed members of David’s congregation aren’t shown to approach the level of happiness that the less stringent members have. These rules and restrictions are making people cold and rigid while depriving them of their neighbors’ company, most demonstrated in a touching subplot about a shopkeeper and a young boy with conservative parents. The shopkeeper would love to keep letting the kid have candy and be generally adorable around him, but not at the cost of submitting to what he sees as injustice.
Ben-Shimon and writer Shlomit Nehama allow the viewer to be snowed just as badly as the male congregants thanks to Alush’s effective performance as a man who deeply cares about this specific brand of Judaism and wants to earnestly proselytize to his neighbors, but it’s the women who steal the film with their woundedness and their wakening civic engagement. They’re the ones being deprived of something, and so it must be them that make things right. Their reconciliation efforts blossom out from their immediate families and friend groups to the whole community. With its indelible matriarch characters matched with passionate performances, the film makes this seem exactly correct.
The Women’s Balcony gets in some earned whacks at the easy target of the hyper-religious, and it does so without exaggerating their characteristics or making them look foolish. What it does do is show how that kind of zeal isn’t making anyone’s life better. A little zeal, on occasion, maybe, but who would want to be separated from women as intelligent and interesting as the ones depicted here? A-
The film rests between a version of religion that is acceptable and community-building and one that is everything the Dawkins’ and the Harris’ of the world despise with its patronizing misogyny and its elevation of trinkets over good works. The committed members of David’s congregation aren’t shown to approach the level of happiness that the less stringent members have. These rules and restrictions are making people cold and rigid while depriving them of their neighbors’ company, most demonstrated in a touching subplot about a shopkeeper and a young boy with conservative parents. The shopkeeper would love to keep letting the kid have candy and be generally adorable around him, but not at the cost of submitting to what he sees as injustice.
Ben-Shimon and writer Shlomit Nehama allow the viewer to be snowed just as badly as the male congregants thanks to Alush’s effective performance as a man who deeply cares about this specific brand of Judaism and wants to earnestly proselytize to his neighbors, but it’s the women who steal the film with their woundedness and their wakening civic engagement. They’re the ones being deprived of something, and so it must be them that make things right. Their reconciliation efforts blossom out from their immediate families and friend groups to the whole community. With its indelible matriarch characters matched with passionate performances, the film makes this seem exactly correct.
The Women’s Balcony gets in some earned whacks at the easy target of the hyper-religious, and it does so without exaggerating their characteristics or making them look foolish. What it does do is show how that kind of zeal isn’t making anyone’s life better. A little zeal, on occasion, maybe, but who would want to be separated from women as intelligent and interesting as the ones depicted here? A-
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