The Secrets
by Avi Nesher
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DVD details
Actor: Adir Miller, Ania Bukstein, Fanny Ardant, Michal ShtamlerDirector: Avi Nesher
Brand: Monterey Home Video
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Subtitled); French (Original Language); Hebrew (Original Language)
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 127 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2009-04-07
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Model: 338182
Studio: MONTEREY VIDEO
DVD Reviews of The Secrets
DVD Review: Female, frum, and feminist
Summary: 5 Stars
Unlike certain other movies one might think of (such as Kadosh and A Price Above Rubies), this film very sensitively and accurately portrayed Hareidi life. In spite of the crazies who grab all of the headlines with antics such as spraying bleach on women wearing pants and short skirts or violently protesting at the Jerusalem Intel because it's open on Shabbos, the reality is that most Hareidim are more along the lines of the people shown in this film. These characters are multi-faceted, and part of a community that is very warm, loving, and loyal to its own, even though certain of the characters test those limits of loyalty because of how they ultimately don't quite fit in. After her mother dies, the scholarly Naomi asks her father, who hasn't balked at teaching her Torah and Talmud, to postpone her marriage to Michael so she can study in seminary for a year. After initial hesitation, he relents and agrees to let Naomi study at a women's seminary in the holy and mystical city of Tzfat. This seminary turns out to be run by a Hareidi feminist hoping to provide higher education to young women and empower them in that way. As the headmistress tells Naomi in one scene, as Orthodox women their liberation is a lot more difficult than and different from the liberation of non-Orthodox women, because they have to work within certain strictures and change things much slower. Naomi is put with three roommates--Sheine, whom she meets on the bus; Sigi, a ba'alat teshuvah (newly religious) who later kind of goes off of the deep end (as sometimes happens with ba'alei teshuvah, going from one extreme to the other without enough time for slow transition), and the much more progressive and secular Michelle (Michal), who didn't go to the seminary of her own choosing but because her French parents wanted her to. The unlikely pair of Naomi and Michelle are soon bonding after being assigned to deliver food to a dying outcast Frenchwoman, Anouk, with a dark secret in her past and a desire to make amends within herself and with God before she passes on. Though traditionally one must be at least 40 years old, male, and married before starting to study Kabbalah, Naomi begins constructing a Tikun based on the teachings of the Arizal so that Anouk can achieve her hoped-for repentance. As the story progresses, Naomi also starts to have second thoughts about her upcoming marriage to Michael and instead falls in love with Michelle, who herself has caught the eye of the endearing Yanki, a clarinetist who, like Naomi and Michelle, also doesn't quite fit into Hareidi society.
Each character is portrayed so vividly that they come across like real people instead of stock characters or people acting out a script. I also liked how it took awhile for the story to unfold and for the characters to develop, even though my boyfriend didn't like how Naomi and Michelle didn't do anything physically until the film was about halfway through. Too many modern American movies are so predictable, with the viewer knowing within 15 minutes what's going to happen and who's going to end up with whom, but in this film, we don't immediately know what's going to happen, like if Naomi and Michelle will decide to live together as a lesbian couple, if Naomi will marry Michael or break the engagement, if Michelle and Yanki will end up together, what Anouk's backstory is and if she'll achieve peace and a sense of atonement, if the seminary will accept or disapprove of Michelle and Naomi's delving into Kabbalah. The story also illustrates, as the headmistress said, just how difficult it is to be female, feminist, and frum. As someone who's not Orthodox, it's easy to say they should just affiliate with Masorti (Conservative) or Liberal/Progressive (Reform) Judaism, or at least find a liberal Modern Orthodox community. This is their entire world, life, culture, identity. They can't just leave the only world they know how to exist in and relate to, even if they do test the outer limits of what's considered acceptable within that world. Someone as brilliant as Naomi faces an uphill battle in her desire to become a rabbi, unlike a woman in a non-Orthodox denomination who faces no opposition anymore to applying to rabbinical school. A lesbian relationship might not be prohibited by the Torah (as Naomi points out, it's never even mentioned in there) and only have a relatively mild Talmudic censure, but it's also not exactly easy to live as a fully frum person who is out of the closet. Yanki is a great person, but because he chose to be a klezmer musician instead of a rabbi or studying in kollel full-time his entire life, he isn't respected as much as someone like Michael. The film also leaves a number of questions to contemplate, as opposed to tying everything up with neat hospital corners and a stereotypical happy Hollywood ending.
Description of The Secrets
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