Byline: Michael Fox

Dr. Ruth a force of nature

Celebrity sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer started life as Karola Ruth Siegel in Weisenfeld, Germany. (photo from Mongrel Media)

Before she rocketed to 1980s TV fame as sex advisor Dr. Ruth, she was simply Ruth Westheimer. And long before she was Ruth Westheimer, she was Karola Ruth Siegel of Weisenfeld, Germany.

It is those formative early years that provide the most resonant and affecting passages in Ryan White’s solid documentary Ask Dr. Ruth, which is scheduled to open in Vancouver May 10. I’ll go even further: They provide the film with its raison d’etre.

Sure, lots of people were helped in ways big and small by Dr. Ruth’s high-profile acceptance of (almost) every form of sexual behaviour and by her uninhibited, direct language about intimate acts and love relationships. But what lifts Ask Dr. Ruth above a “where are they now” profile of an old-media, pop-culture celebrity is Karola Ruth Siegel’s experiences before, during and immediately after the Second World War.

Most audiences, especially non-Jewish viewers, will come to Ask Dr. Ruth for the sex. The mitzvah of the film, as it were, is that they will get the Holocaust.

To be clear, Dr. Ruth doesn’t see herself as a Holocaust survivor. She is “an orphan of the Holocaust,” which is the most poignant and wrenching phrase you’ll encounter all week.

Born in 1928, Karola Ruth was the sole child of observant Jewish parents. She was too young to fully understand when the Nazis sent her father to a labour camp in the 1930s. And, as bright as she was, she couldn’t fully grasp the long-term implications when her parents put her on a train to Switzerland with a group of Jewish children.

Placed in an orphanage, Karola Ruth and the other Jewish kids were handed housekeeping duties and some responsibilities for caring for the Swiss kids. They received food and shelter, but zero love and little compassion. A natural ringleader – on the train, she’d organized a sing-along to distract the homesick youngsters – Karola Ruth figured out ways to educate and entertain herself.

She discovered boys, of course, and the film accompanies her abroad to a warm reunion with her first boyfriend, Walter Nothmann. It’s pretty chaste stuff, presented by Westheimer with nostalgia and charm, which conveys universal attitudes of adolescence.

At the same time, though, Karola Ruth was devouring and savouring every letter and poem she received from her mother and father – until weeks, and then months, passed without any communication. (She preserved and protected these treasures throughout her travels, and keeps them in plastic sleeves in a notebook.)

The animation style used by filmmaker White to illustrate Karola Ruth’s Swiss period is annoyingly juvenile, unless one presumes that children are one of the intended audiences of Ask Dr. Ruth. Admittedly, those experiences are as accessible and relevant to today’s children as Anne Frank’s, if not more so, but parents and guardians would need to know that the focus of a documentary about a sex therapist isn’t, uh, sex.

At some point after the war, Westheimer accepted that her parents had been killed by the Nazis, but she never sought out the details. All these years later, while visiting Israel during the filming of Ask Dr. Ruth, she goes to Yad Vashem and learns that her father died in 1942 in Auschwitz. The notation for her mother is “disappeared/murdered.”

Ask Dr. Ruth skilfully weaves three threads and three distinct time frames: its subject’s biography from the 1930s to the 1960s, her high-profile heyday in the 1980s and 1990s, and her peripatetic schedule of speaking engagements and family contacts, climaxing with her 90th birthday last June.

The trek to Israel, fascinatingly, includes a visit with a friend from Kibbutz Ramat David, where Ruth Siegel – persuaded that Karola was too German, she dropped it – landed in Palestine at age 17. This remarkable chapter of her life includes ceding her virginity, being trained as a Haganah sniper and, on her 20th birthday during the War of Independence, being injured so badly in a bombing that there was a question whether she’d be able to use her feet again.

The next 70 years of Dr. Ruth Westheimer’s life, spanning Paris, New York, three husbands, two children, a doctorate at age 42, a radio show, household name recognition and four grandchildren, are acutely interesting. But the imprint of coming of age during the war, without her parents but with determination, resourcefulness, intelligence and humour, defined Karola Ruth Siegel and infuses Ask Dr. Ruth with timeless importance.

“From my background, all of the things I’ve survived,” Westheimer declares, “I have an obligation to live large and make a dent in this world.”

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Things aren’t a person

Camera in model, from 306 Hollywood. (photo from El Tigre Productions)

Annette Ontell, the New Jersey grandmother at the centre of the glorified home movie 306 Hollywood, lived an ordinary middle-class Jewish existence for six decades at that Newark address.

She didn’t come close to the achievements of RBG heroine Ruth Bader Ginsburg, nor the fame (and heartache) of Love, Gilda star Gilda Radner. Nor did Ontell have the tabloid TV highs and lows of the separated brothers in Three Identical Strangers, yet another documentary with Jewish protagonists that made waves at the box office last year.

Of course, one needn’t get her name in the paper or his face on a screen to live a productive, satisfying life. More to the point, plenty of wonderful and profound documentaries have been made about the small-scale triumphs and travails of everyday people. 306 Hollywood, which received a brief theatrical release in 2018 and airs on PBS’s POV series in the coming weeks, is not one of them.

Siblings Elan and Jonathan Bogarin affect an imaginative and stylized “dig” into their dear grandmother’s objects and possessions to the accompaniment of a kinda whimsical, kinda wistful indie-film score. Their strategy yields a parade of eye-catching images and bizarre set pieces that, individually and collectively, provide no insight into this, or any, American life.

The upshot is that 306 Hollywood combines the lacquered sheen and pastel palette of long-form television with the naiveté-masquerading-as-perceptiveness of a film-school project.

photo - The directors’ grandmother’s silhouette, from their film 306 Hollywood
The directors’ grandmother’s silhouette, from their film 306 Hollywood. (photo from El Tigre Productions)

To be sure, the filmmakers’ goals, in addition to crafting a work of commercial art, are worthwhile: to uncover and grasp the meaning in a person’s life, and to honour and preserve the memory of a beloved relative whom they visited (with their mother) almost every Sunday for 30 years.

The Bogarins opt to catalogue and focus on the massive detritus – from radios and vacuum cleaners to rubber bands and fashion magazine clippings – that Ontell amassed over the 63 years she resided in the house, most of it spent with her husband. (Her brother lived with them, but he died in his late 40s.)

Ontell had a career as a dress designer and dressmaker, but the creative person she once was doesn’t emerge in the prosaic interviews that her grandchildren filmed with her over the last decade of her life. Instead, to conjure a person (and a personality) from her inanimate objects, the filmmakers enlist a “fashion conservator.” To invoke the metaphysical resonances of time and memory, they turn to physicist and author Alan Lightman.

Perhaps in a nod to Ontell’s artistic impulses, the Bogarins stage a fashion show with her original evening dresses in the yard at 306 Hollywood, and a ballet of young women modeling mid-20th-century lingerie. These sequences are visually impressive but self-indulgent. They aren’t as misguided, however, as the excruciatingly long home-movie scene of the filmmakers’ mother cajoling Ontell (her mother) into disrobing and donning one of her vintage dresses from the 1950s.

The pained presence of an older woman prodded into revisiting the past through her garments does have one benefit: it frees 306 Hollywood from the bonds of hagiography. But none of this gets us any closer to appreciating Ontell, or any emblematic Jewish mother, or to gleaning significance from the connection that human beings have to their possessions. The filmmakers’ choices are so showily ineffective, in fact, that we only rarely reflect on the emotions triggered by the absence and memories of our own forebears.

The most gifted documentary filmmaker I know at transforming the personal into the universal and the banal into the profound is Alan Berliner. The Jewish New Yorker’s masterful family portraits Intimate Stranger (1991) and Nobody’s Business (1996) can be streamed for free through Kanopy, accessible with many public library cards.

306 Hollywood airs March 30, 11 p.m., on KCTS 9 and on WTVS April 4 (check local listings for the time).

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Accountant in Seattle

Auschwitz survivor Eva Kor forgives former SS officer Oskar Gröning. (photo from TLNT Productions)

The Accountant of Auschwitz is more than the latest documentary to successfully convey the horrors of antisemitic genocide to an audience 75 years removed from those events. It exemplifies the emergence of a coterie of young filmmakers eager to tell the stories of the Holocaust to their peers and to future generations.

For Toronto director Matthew Shoychet and producer Ricki Gurwitz, the trial of nonagenarian SS officer Oskar Gröning in his Lower Saxony hometown in 2015 provided the entry point to explore an ambitious array of historical, legal and moral concerns. The approach they chose for their debut feature documentary, however, was as important as the facts and the message.

“The way we put it together with the editors, we knew we didn’t want to play it chronologically,” the 32-year-old Shoychet explained. “The film opens with fast-paced, happy music with animation, then right into the trial, then back. You’re challenging the audience, but in a fresh, exciting way. You don’t see many Holocaust films that are told that way.”

The Accountant of Auschwitz screened at the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival last fall and is part of the Seattle Jewish Film Festival, which opens March 23.

Shoychet’s path to The Accountant of Auschwitz was unusual in that his family was not directly affected by the Holocaust. He was interested in films about the Holocaust, but he wasn’t instilled with the kind of painful personal history that was (and still is) the catalyst for many filmmakers.

In 2013, Shoychet went on the March of the Living to Poland and Israel, where he received his first close-up exposure to the Final Solution and Holocaust education. A friend he made on that trip went to work for the Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre in Toronto, and that contact led to Shoychet directing the short film Anne Frank: 70 Years Later (2015), which screened at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the University of Warsaw.

Shoychet joined that year’s March of the Living as a chaperone, where he met Bill Glied, a Serbian native who’d been deported from Hungary to Auschwitz in 1944. When Glied remarked that he was going to Germany to testify at Gröning’s trial, Shoychet and Gurwitz put a pitch together to the Government of Ontario, the Rogers Documentary Fund, CBC’s Documentary Channel and a couple of private investors.

“It came together fast,” said Shoychet, who arrived on the scene in Lüneburg, Germany, in the midst of the trial.

photo - For Toronto director Matthew Shoychet, the trial of SS officer Oskar Gröning in 2015 provided the entry point to explore an ambitious array of historical, legal and moral concerns
For Toronto director Matthew Shoychet, the trial of SS officer Oskar Gröning in 2015 provided the entry point to explore an ambitious array of historical, legal and moral concerns. (photo from TLNT Productions)

Gröning’s job, as The Accountant of Auschwitz makes clear, wasn’t loading Zyklon B into the gas chambers or machine-gunning Jews. Thanks to a change in German law, it is no longer necessary to prove that a Nazi pulled the trigger. His presence at the scene and involvement in crimes is sufficient to decide guilt.

“Oskar was on the ramp [when the trains arrived and where selections occurred], taking suitcases and calming chaos,” Shoychet said. “But it was all part of the mass murder operation.”

Among the issues that The Accountant of Auschwitz takes on is the purpose and value of trying a 94-year-old man for war crimes. The film makes a convincing argument on multiple grounds, beginning with the extent of the cover-up that took place in Germany after the war.

“Ninety-nine percent of the judges in West Germany from 1945 to 1967 were members of the Nazi party,” Shoychet noted. “Hardcore believers. Of the 800,000 SS officers, 100,000 were investigated between 1945 and today, just over 6,000 were brought to trial and 124 received life sentences.”

That paltry number minimizes the scale of the crimes and serves to bury the past. The film asserts that Gröning’s confirmation under oath of his work at Auschwitz was a public and irrefutable rebuttal to Holocaust deniers and other antisemites.

“Even if you say he’s too old – and even the survivors say they don’t care if he goes to prison – for history’s purposes, the fact that a Nazi perpetrator is sitting in a German courtroom with German judges, saying, ‘Yes, these things happened, I was there,’ that makes the trial worthwhile,” Shoychet said.

A loquacious interview subject, even on the phone from Israel, where he had presented The Accountant of Auschwitz at the Jerusalem Jewish Film Festival a few months ago and was presently working on a project of the One Family Fund (he’s a board member), Shoychet confided that the process of making his feature doc debut was one of learning as he went. For example, until he went to Germany, he had never heard of John Demjanjuk, a Ukrainian who had been convicted of crimes at Sobibor yet consistently denied any involvement. Demjanjuk’s tangled tale, which, among other things, raises the subject of putting an elderly man on trial, ended up being a 20-minute segment in the film.

The Accountant of Auschwitz is rife with revelations and messages, but one gets the sense in talking with Shoychet that his main goal was conveying his own experiences of discovery, discussion, inspiration and outrage – with respect to Nazis and survivors, as well as contemporary justice-seekers and neo-Nazis – to viewers his own age.

“There may not be an ISIS fighter who will be deterred by a 94-year-old Nazi being prosecuted,” Shoychet allowed. “It’s making the connection of the past to the present. Trying to take a younger person and put them in the shoes of the survivors.”

Shoychet’s affinity for provoking questions and debate among the audience bodes well for his next efforts behind the camera.

“I never actually thought I would make a documentary,” he said with a trace of bemusement. “My passion is scripted narratives.”

For tickets to The Accountant of Auschwitz and the film festival schedule, visit seattlejewishfilmfestival.org. For another perspective on the impact of Gröning’s trial, see jewishindependent.ca/witnessing-her-history.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

How RGB got her start in law

Marty Ginsburg (Armie Hammer) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Felicity Jones) arrive at court in On the Basis of Sex. (photo from Focus Features)

A news flash for members of the tribe who’ve been kvelling over a Jewish woman on the U.S. Supreme Court for fully a quarter of a century: Ruth Bader Ginsburg long ago matriculated beyond a symbol of ethnic achievement.

Last year’s hit documentary, RBG, noted that Justice Ginsburg is an enormously popular role model for women in their teens and 20s, and she has achieved pop culture celebrity to boot. The latest film – released recently in Canada and, as of press time, still playing in Metro Vancouver – is On the Basis of Sex, which applies the Hollywood treatment to Ginsburg’s beginnings as a smart but struggling lawyer and situates her smack in the mainstream. To coin a Lincolnesque testimonial, now she belongs to the masses.

Director Mimi Leder and screenwriter Daniel Stiepleman (who happens to be Ruth and Marty Ginsburg’s nephew) frame On the Basis of Sex as an underdog saga. And, like a lot of underdogs in Hollywood movies, our heroine has a superpower that she only discovers – and masters – on her journey.

The movie is effective, and ultimately inspiring, in a way that doesn’t remotely challenge viewers other than to ask them to follow clever legal strategies.

The film opens with Ginsburg’s first days at Harvard Law School, where her husband Marty is in his second year. Immediately and repeatedly, she (and the viewer) is reminded of her second-class status as a woman in a man’s world.

It takes awhile to reconcile the confident Justice Ginsburg of public record with the somewhat skittish character that British actress Felicity Jones creates. On the one hand, as a wife and a mother who – like every other aspiring woman professional of the time – never wears pants, Ginsburg is plainly a grownup. But she’s patronized by everyone from the law school’s WASPy dean (a villainous Sam Waterston) to her husband (a stalwart Armie Hammer), and she risks being seen as a rabble-rouser (it’s the late 1950s) simply by standing up for herself.

Although the film does not conceal or finesse the Ginsburgs’ Jewishness, it presents casual misogyny and the entrenched old boys’ network, not antisemitism, as the obstacles Ruth needs to navigate. Consequently, she has to devise ways – both direct and elliptical – to raise the consciousness of every ally, including her devoted husband, before she can even challenge potential adversaries. While Marty certainly recognizes his wife’s brilliance, he’s a product of his upbringing and the times.

On the Basis of Sex or, as it’s referred to at your favourite corned beef dispensary, “RBG: The Early Years,” devotes considerable screen time to the couple’s relationship and, for many viewers, that will serve as the emotional heart of the film. Others will derive more pleasure from Ginsburg finding her footing and her voice as a scholarly attorney.

As Stiepleman noted in an interview during a recent visit to San Francisco, “Coming out of law school, [Ginsburg] had three strikes against her: she was a woman, she was a mother and she was a Jew. Any one of those things alone, law firms had taken the risk. It was the three together that made her unhire-able in their eyes.”

Unable to find a job practising law, she takes a teaching position. Through a combination of determination, persistence and luck, she comes across a unique case that addresses the inequities of gender discrimination. The complainant, who looked after his mother but was denied the tax deduction for caregivers, is a man.

Earlier in the film, there’s a crucial chain of events when her husband is diagnosed with cancer. Ginsburg not only took care of him (and their small daughter), but got them both through law school. That experience as a caregiver gives her both the empathy and the understanding to identify with and persuade her would-be client, as well as to research and argue the case.

The lengthy courtroom scene that comprises the film’s last 20 minutes or so is genuinely effective and even emotional, despite the formulaic staging and the fact that we know Ginsburg will prevail. At the pivotal moment, we witness a character coming into her own, grasping her abilities and realizing her destiny. And with that, the underdog becomes a superhero.

On the Basis of Sex is rated PG-13 for some language and suggestive content.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Radner tells her own stories

Gilda Radner scrapbooking in Love, Gilda, a Magnolia Pictures release. (photo from Magnolia Pictures)

The late, great sketch comedian Gilda Radner is a Jewish icon. Offstage and out of character, however, she wasn’t especially Jewish.

“I think you would have to ask Gilda if she considered herself a Jewish comedienne,” mused Laraine Newman, her friend and fellow Jewish cast mate for the first five seasons of Saturday Night Live.

“I’d love to hear the answer,” replied Lisa D’Apolito, director of the deeply affectionate and painfully revealing documentary, Love, Gilda.

“Honest to God, I don’t know,” Newman said. “I couldn’t characterize her one way or the other. I would think that would have to come from her.”

In Love, Gilda, D’Apolito does the next best thing: she wisely channels her subject’s voice through a trove of clips, personal audiotapes and diary entries (read by contemporary comics Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Melissa McCarthy and others).

Love, Gilda, which has screened at numerous Jewish film festivals to rousing applause, is part of this year’s Vancouver Jewish Film Festival lineup.

Radner grew up in a well-off Jewish family in Detroit. But her beloved father was diagnosed with a brain tumour when she was 12 and died two years later. Her mother delegated many of the child-raising duties, and the film hints that she was not the most supportive parent.

“Gilda was also raised by her nanny, who happened to be Christian,” D’Apolito related hours before Love, Gilda opened the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival in July. “So Gilda observed all kinds of different religions and what she identified with, I wasn’t really sure. I wanted to cover where I thought some of her insecurities came from. Losing her father was really important – and her mother putting her on diet pills.”

The nanny, Dibby, was the inspiration for one of Radner’s most popular SNL characters, Emily Litella. As for the diet pills, Gilda’s body image issues as an adolescent led to eating disorders that plagued her into adulthood.

“When I found the audiotapes, it was so different to hear her talking than to see her on an interview or hear people talking about her,” D’Apolito said. “It was just mesmerizing, because you get a real sense of Gilda. She’s sitting in a café talking to somebody, she’s ordering things, she’s telling stories and she’s extremely intelligent and extremely funny. That was really important to me, that an audience have the same experience I had.”

D’Apolito was guided in her interview choices – musician Paul Shaffer, actor Martin Short and writer Alan Zweibel, among others – by whom Gilda spoke about on the tapes. Alas, Gene Wilder, the love of Radner’s life according to D’Apolito, and her husband from 1984 until she died in 1989, was too ill to participate. (He died in August 2016.)

photo - Gene Wilder, Gilda Radner and Sparkle in Love, Gilda, a Magnolia Pictures release
Gene Wilder, Gilda Radner and Sparkle in Love, Gilda, a Magnolia Pictures release. (photo from Magnolia Pictures)

“Gene was everything she was looking for, because he was a Jewish guy from the Midwest,” D’Apolito said of the Milwaukee native, born Jerome Silberman. “That’s what she always wanted, I’ve been told.”

Radner and Wilder met on the set of the 1980s film Hanky Panky, which originally was going to co-star Richard Pryor and was rewritten for a female lead. Wilder then directed Radner (and himself) in the equally disappointing comedies The Woman in Red and Haunted Honeymoon.

The brashness and vitality of Radner’s TV and stage work showed “that she never doubted that she was equal to any man,” D’Apolito said. “That’s what I take away from Gilda’s performances.”

Newman lamented that Radner’s movie career suffered because casting directors and producers lacked the imagination to cast her correctly.

“The specific nature of her talent was she did characters, and she would probably have been better served if she had taken part in writing the things that she did. But I don’t think it occurred to her,” Newman said. “If she and Alan Zweibel had collaborated on a feature, it might have been a whole different thing.”

D’Apolito’s connection to Radner goes back to the first videos she directed eight years ago for Gilda’s Club, a cancer support group founded by Wilder in New York after Radner died from ovarian cancer at age 42.

D’Apolito didn’t meet Wilder, however, until he invited the filmmaker to his house the year before he died. They spent a memorable day talking, and hanging out with his dogs.

“Somehow, at the end of the day, Gene and I just sat in the garden together,” D’Apolito recalled. “I could see why Gilda loved him.”

Love, Gilda (86 minutes, unrated) screens Nov. 8, 1 p.m., at Fifth Avenue Cinemas. For the full schedule of the Vancouver Jewish Film Festival, which runs Nov. 7-Dec. 2, visit vjff.org.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Hesse driven to be an artist

Eva Hesse is the subject of an Aug. 31 episode of PBS’s American Masters series. (photo by Herman Landshoff)

Eva Hesse’s childhood was a rollercoaster of displacement, reunion, destabilization and trauma. In the journals she kept as a teenager and adult, the German-born, New York-based artist recognized the source of her chronic insecurity. Yet, paradoxically, and remarkably, her work evinces no anguish or suffering, and no need to expose or extinguish demons from the past. From her early, brightly coloured drawings and paintings, through the textured, abstract sculptures and installations that made her reputation, her art comprises a series of experiments in forward-looking forms of expression.

Eva Hesse screens Aug. 31 (check local listings) in PBS’s American Masters series. A palpable labour of love, Marcie Begleiter’s densely detailed 2016 documentary is a soup-to-nuts portrait that encompasses the artist’s personal life and times – New York in the 1960s – along with her professional development and impact.

Begleiter’s diligence notwithstanding, Eva Hesse never delivers the aha moment, where the person and her work snap together, and we understand exactly how Hesse’s defining childhood experiences informed her work. I’ll venture, though, that Holocaust survivors, and children of survivors, will identify with Hesse’s internalized struggles, and read between the lines of her journals and the recollections of her older sister, Helen.

In 1962, the art-school grad fell in love with and married a hard-partying Irish-American sculptor named Tom Doyle. Because her father insisted that she marry a Jew, Doyle willingly converted to Judaism.

Doyle, who was the more advanced and accomplished artist at the time, was offered a residency in Germany a couple years later, and the couple ended up living there for more than a year. Their relationship fractured abroad, in part because of his drinking and flirting, but Hesse made a major leap in her art practice from painting to sculpture.

Eva Hesse, which generally unfolds chronologically, uses this period to flash back to Hesse’s chaotic childhood. Born in Hamburg in 1936, she and Helen were sent on a Kindertransport to the Netherlands in 1938. When their parents left Germany several months later, the family reunited and fled Europe for England and, in short order, New York. They were the only members of the family to escape the Holocaust.

When Hesse’s mother, who suffered from depression and mental illness, learned in 1946 that her parents had died in the camps, she jumped from a roof to her death. (Hesse’s father had separated and remarried by this time.)

While the documentary is continually interested in its subject’s mental state, neither the filmmaker nor Hesse’s devoted artist friends are especially keen to psychoanalyze her. Perhaps she was scarred by the abandonment of her parents as a toddler, though one could also understand her self-doubt, given the establishment of male gallery owners, museum curators and critics.

Which brings us to another fundamental paradox of Hesse, namely that the insecurities she voiced in her journals, and in letters to artist, mentor and close friend Sol LeWitt, were matched by an unwavering drive to be an artist, an adherence to her muse (wherever it took her) and the awareness that she was pretty darn good at her work.

In fact, Hesse was an extrovert and a lot of fun, by most accounts. From the outset, Eva Hesse is plainly not a study of a tortured artist. Nor was she unrecognized and unappreciated in her own lifetime, for she had a major solo show and made the cover of Artforum before she died of a brain tumour in 1970. She was 34 years old.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Lelio’s film terrific

Left to right: Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola in Disobedience. (photo from Bleecker Street)

Sebastián Lelio’s beautifully wrought Disobedience is some kind of small miracle. A close-up portrait of three 30-something British Jews grappling with their respective sexual and religious truths, it is a timeless saga that feels utterly contemporary.

It’s a film that probably couldn’t have been made even 10 years ago, because it assumes and addresses a world – or at least a generation or two – that is perfectly comfortable with the fluidity of sexual identity. Disobedience comes from a place where homosexual and bisexual relationships aren’t abnormal or unhealthy, even if they are still taboo in some subcultures.

Adapted from Naomi Alderman’s 2006 novel, Disobedience takes a familiar concept – the return of the prodigal child years after she left her Orthodox Jewish family and community – and spins it on a fresh and unexpected axis.

This type of drama has usually been framed as a dialectic between faith and secularism, and tradition and modernity. The emotional punch typically derives from sympathetic individuals bulldozed by a patriarchy portrayed as tyrannical and anachronistic.

The conflict in Disobedience isn’t between people on opposite sides of an irreconcilable philosophical divide – which would inevitably propel the viewer to identify with one protagonist and condemn the others – but within each person: who am I, and what hard choices do I need to make right now to live an authentic, satisfying life?

One refreshing consequence is there are no villains, whose roles are to constrain and injure the characters, in Disobedience. Furthermore, because the stakes are personal and individual, the film neatly sidesteps or backgrounds big-picture questions such as the modern world’s challenges and threats to the Orthodox community.

The movie opens with the elderly London rabbi of a small shul collapsing in mid-sermon. On the other side of the Atlantic, a dark-haired photographer (Rachel Weisz) shoots a man adorned with tattoos. The introduction of Ronit in conjunction with one of Judaism’s prohibitions instantly illustrates the distance she’s put between her upbringing and her current life. (In fact, if my hearing is accurate, in New York she dropped the “t” long ago and goes by Roni, an act of reinvention and assimilation.)

In a succession of quick shots, Ronit receives some bad news, has anonymous sex with a male stranger and, finally alone, tears her sweater in a Jewish gesture of mourning. The gifted Chilean filmmaker Lelio, who adapted the novel with British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, immediately delineates a wild child who isn’t happy in the present nor reconciled to her past.

Ronit’s return to London for her respected father’s funeral isn’t welcomed by relatives and other members of the congregation, and we get the vaguest hints about the circumstances that led to her self-imposed exile. (Hers was the first act of disobedience, but it won’t be the last.) She receives a slightly warmer reception from the obvious heir to the late rav’s pulpit, the perpetually restrained Dovid Kuperman (Alessandro Nivola) and his demure wife Esti (Rachel MacAdams).

We expect the film to portray Ronit as a troubled heroine for choosing a “liberated” life and as the awkward outsider enduring a loss without much support. Lelio’s prior films, A Fantastic Woman (last year’s Academy Award-winning portrait of a grieving transgender woman) and Gloria (centred on an older woman who wilfully pursues a romance with a problematic man), conveyed his respect for women defying the judgment and rules of others.

However, Ronit behaves so selfishly and inappropriately that we are insulted along with the Orthodox characters. Disobedience is a form of rebellion, but people aren’t automatically entitled to hurt others – or to jeopardize their jobs and relationships – in the course of expressing their nonconformity. And that is the crux of Ronit’s entanglement with Esti and, to a lesser degree, Dovid. The great pleasure and power of Disobedience is the skill and subtlety with which Lelio interweaves their desires and responsibilities.

By the end of this terrific film, the various markers and labels that describe – and constrain – the characters have been scrubbed away. They are simply human beings, trying to do the right thing.

Disobedience opened May 18 at Cineplex Odeon International Village. The film is rated R for some strong sexuality.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Foxtrot steps on toes

Itay Exlroad as Dancer Soldier. (photo by Giora Bejach, Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics)

An audacious work of art that melds raw emotion and absurdist allegory into a blistering assessment of contemporary Israel, Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot deserves to be seen and demands to be discussed.

Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival – where Maoz’s taut debut, Lebanon, won the Golden Lion in 2009 – and eight Ophir Awards (Israel’s Oscars), including best film, director and actor, Foxtrot uses a small-scale story to examine some of Israel’s deepest issues: the concept of military sacrifice, the oppression of Palestinians and the legacy of the Holocaust.

Skilfully strewn with ironies all the way to the final shot, Foxtrot was shortlisted for the Academy Award for best foreign language film but did not receive a nomination.

The film begins with a middle-aged man (the sublime Lior Ashkenazi, who played a fictitious prime minister last year in Norman and Yitzhak Rabin in this month’s 7 Days in Entebbe) opening his door to the worst possible news for a father with a son in the army. Even as the gravity of the situation and the intensity of his response wallops us in the face and grabs us by the collar, Maoz counter-intuitively undercuts the emotional naturalism with precision camerawork and a stylized set design.

It appears, at first, that the filmmaker is evoking the surreal, detached and alienating experience of being struck with a life-changing bulletin. But we get the nagging feeling, from Ashkenazi’s character’s black-humour interactions with the army representatives to the off-centre introductions of his wife and daughter, that there’s more on tap than the melodrama of domestic tragedy.

Indeed, Maoz pulls the rug out from under us, then cuts from the climate-controlled setting of a high-in-the-sky condo to an isolated checkpoint in the barren, forgotten north of Israel. This is where the son, Yonatan, is assigned the “mission” of guarding a remote, nonessential road with a handful of other bored young men.

The tilted shipping container that comprises the soldiers’ base and barracks fronts on a puddle-strewn mudfield, which they must trudge across to the checkpoint. The roadblock itself is cartoonishly minimalist, resembling a set you’d see onstage more than a military installation, and putting us in mind of surrealist (anti-)war films like Apocalypse Now and Catch-22.

Nothing happens in this God-forsaken spot, and everything happens here. Each detail has significance, though one must pay close attention because it may not be clear until events play out. In fact, the meaning of a close-up or sound cue often remains obscure until the movie is over, at which point the viewer is required to arrive at his or her interpretation.

Two key events occur at Yonatan’s base: one at the checkpoint involving a carload of Palestinians heading home from a party and the other in the barracks when the soldiers are killing lonely downtime. The latter scene, in which Yonatan relates an anecdote from his father’s youth, is the most astonishing passage in this taboo-trampling movie.

photo - Left to right: Danny Isserles as Official Military Officer, Yehuda Almagor as Avigdor, Michael’s brother, and Lior Ashkenazi as Michael
Left to right: Danny Isserles as Official Military Officer, Yehuda Almagor as Avigdor, Michael’s brother, and Lior Ashkenazi as Michael. (photo by Giora Bejach, Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics)

Yonatan has rendered his memory into a graphic novel, and Maoz brings it to life in the form of animation. This harrowing episode connects the Holocaust – and the self-reliance, persistence, shared sacrifice and residual faith that survivors applied to building the Jewish state – to a modern Israel, where idealism has curdled into a pursuit of temporary pleasures, and worse offences.

To be sure, in every land and every age, older generations castigate young people for ignoring tradition and abandoning their core values. But this parable takes place in Israel, so Yonatan’s father’s hormone-driven rashness hearkens to Esau swapping his birthright for a bowl of stew.

Threaded through Foxtrot is a critique of Israel’s leaders for maintaining a culture of cynicism and corruption that results in the unnecessary deaths of young soldiers. Furthermore, each loss is described as heroic regardless of the circumstances.

This is not unique to Israel, of course, but it’s harder to push back against the military spin when you’re a small country surrounded by enemies than a superpower. Maoz satirizes PR functionaries in the opening scene, in fact, and never stops spearing sacred cows.

Maoz’s triumph, finally, thanks in large measure to Ashkenazi’s unexpectedly vulnerable performance, is tracking the human cost amid the not-quite-real scenarios and sociopolitical commentary. Foxtrot is an altogether remarkable work, not least because it is a beautiful film about ugly truths.

Foxtrot is in Hebrew with English subtitles, runs 113 minutes and is rated R for some sexual content, including graphic images and brief drug use. It opens at Vancity Theatre on March 23, and runs to April 1.

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

Tensions trigger Insult

Adel Karam as Toni, left, and Kamel El Basha as Yasser in The Insult. (photo from Cohen Media Group)

Ziad Doueiri was born in Lebanon, studied filmmaking at San Diego State and worked nonstop for more than a decade in Los Angeles as an assistant cameraman shooting Quentin Tarantino’s early movies, among others.

“One of my favourite films of all time, I looked at the film and said, ‘One day, I hope I make a movie like this,’ is Judgment at Nuremberg,” confided the impassioned director of Lebanon’s official Oscar submission, The Insult.

Inspired by Stanley Kramer’s 1961 courtroom drama, Doueiri set out to make a deeply felt moral saga using a familiar American genre that would connect with an international audience. The catalyst that sets The Insult in motion is an altercation on a Beirut street between a Lebanese Christian mechanic and a Palestinian construction supervisor. They are unable to resolve their disagreement for personal reasons – male ego and pride, to start – compounded by the overriding political context. The Insult unfolds against a backdrop of half a million Palestinians living as refugees in a country with a population of four million.

“The Palestinians came in 1948,” Doueiri noted in an interview during a visit to San Francisco late last year. “They never returned, they could not return. They were not given green cards. They were not given the right to settle in Lebanon, or the right to work.”

The Lebanese government’s logic, according to the Paris-based filmmaker, was and is “if we give you jobs, you’ll start making a good life. And if a Palestinian settles down in Lebanon and does not go to Palestine, the Israelis are happy.”

Meanwhile, the dispute between the antagonists escalates into a court case that, unexpectedly, turns into a penetrating historical inquiry exposing the depths of simmering resentment between the Lebanese and Palestinians. The elephant in the courtroom, of course, is Israel.

“The Insult is not about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,” stressed Doueiri. “It’s a story of two people, one who is seeking justice and the other who doesn’t believe in it. The film is also about [how] you cannot have exclusivity on massacres. The Palestinians, in the last 20, 30, 40 years, they have kind of gained a monopoly on their suffering. The Insult is a way of saying, ‘You can’t blame Israelis all the time.’”

Doueiri acknowledged that his emigration to the United States in 1983 began a process of dissipating the hatred he grew up with for everything that’s Jewish and Israeli. Another important turning point was shooting The Attack – his first-rate thriller about a successful Arab surgeon in Tel Aviv whose world collapses after his wife commits a terrible crime – in Israel in 2011.

“The dedication of the Israeli crew on my film was fantastic,” Doueiri said with his characteristic intensity. “How could that not change you?”

Doueiri took a huge risk shooting The Attack in Israel.

“Not only is it a moral dilemma for the Lebanese that one of their compatriots went to Israel, it’s a legal problem,” he explained. “I violated Law 285. It is incontestable.”

When Doueiri flew to Beirut in September last year after premièring The Insult at the Venice Film Festival – where Kamel El Basha received the best actor award for his portrayal of Yasser – he was arrested at the airport. He claims he was released due to the direct intercession of the prime minister, but, regardless, he had to appear the next day before a military judge who specializes in cases involving Israeli collaborators and ISIS terrorists.

“The judge was really bothered by this case,” Doueiri said. “He knows that I did not collaborate with the Israelis. I did not share military information. I just went to do a movie. And I’m an American citizen.”

Fortunately for everyone concerned, Doueiri’s lawyer discovered a loophole: the five-year statute of limitations had expired.

“Isn’t it great?” Doueiri said with a smile. “This is how I was acquitted. It’s a movie. Isn’t it a movie?”

The Insult generated a lot of debate when it screened in Beirut in the fall, according to Doueiri. A truly happy ending would be if it gets a wide release in the Arab world.

The Insult opens Friday, Feb. 23, at Vancity Theatre (viff.org).

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.

To leave a community

A still from One Of Us. (photo from lokifilms.com/one-of-us)

The riveting Netflix documentary One of Us follows three New Yorkers in various stages of the painful process of leaving their Chassidic community. The lone woman among them is far and away the film’s most memorable character, in part because she has the most harrowing journey.

“Etty was in the middle of a case and under massive personal duress from the beginning,” co-director Rachel Grady recalled. “She was apprehensive at first [about being in the movie] because she’s somebody that does not seek attention and would never under normal circumstances want to be filmed or photographed for her ego.”

Etty had filed for divorce after 12 years, claiming physical abuse, and she was fighting an uphill battle for custody of her seven children. At the same time, her family and friends abandoned her.

“We had agreed we wouldn’t show her face,” said co-director Heidi Ewing. “She had very good reasons for not wanting her identity to be shown to the world. What happens in the film is what happened to us in life, which is, about halfway through the project, she said, ‘I’ve got nothing to lose anymore. I’m not going to hide.’”

“She was very much alone and isolated and this insane, unexpected reaction from the community was happening to her,” said Grady. “She couldn’t believe it herself. I think she needed some documentation that this was real.”

One of Us debuted on Netflix in mid-October, but the New York-based filmmakers were recently on the West Coast for screenings and Q&As with Academy members who will vote on Oscar nominations.

Grady and Ewing, whose films include last year’s Norman Lear: Just Another Version of You and Jesus Camp, took steps to include the Chassidic community’s perspective, including a portion of a rabbi’s speech at an assembly at New York’s Citi Field that laments the threat – assimilation on steroids – that the modern world poses to Chassidism.

“Anything we had to show the warmth among the people in the community is in the movie,” said Ewing. “If you’re in the community, if you’re standing by all the rules and doing the right thing, there’s a lot to be gained. People will know about you and care about you. It’s when you deviate a little bit to the left or right, there’s going to be consequences.”

While most of the duo’s films focus on a religious community, Grady noted that they are interested in the belief systems that create community rather than matters of doctrine.

“It’s really about the community, how you identify yourself, how you identify yourself compared to others, your worldview based on your community,” Grady explained. “It’s something we could explore over and over and over, and religion is just a great way to do it. You could do the same thing on the zealots at my food co-op.”

Grady, who was raised Jewish in Washington, D.C., confided that she had never thought more about being a Jew than in the three years that she and Ewing were making One of Us.

“This idea that Jews always talk about, is it an ethnic group, is it culture, is it religion? It’s all of those things, and it weighs heavily one way or another depending how you were raised. In this case, there’s a group of people who are my neighbours in Brooklyn that I see every day and I know that I have a deep connection with them.

“I’m always thinking, ‘Did my great-grandfather do that? Would I have done that?’ It was kind of like an exercise every day when I was working on this film.”

While those questions will come up for some viewers as well, they are more likely to be moved by Etty’s struggle to leave the only society she’s known and forge a life in the wider world.

One of Us is now streaming on Netflix (unrated, in English and Yiddish, 95 minutes).

Michael Fox is a writer and film critic living in San Francisco.