nothin “Felix and Meira” Takes Off The Wig | New Haven Independent

Felix and Meira” Takes Off The Wig

Choice #1: Art, beauty, dancing, passionate physical love, and a gondolier singing to you as you are paddled along the romantically lit Grand Canal of Venice.

The price: All the scary freedom in the world, so you to have to figure out almost everything for yourself, like what to do in the morning and every moment of your life after that.

Choice #2: Your world is chilly Montreal in the heart of winter, deep inside the insular, highly structured, repressively patriarchal world of a Hasidic community. There, as a woman, your role is mainly to have children. You know your place, how to dress, what is expected, and, if you behave yourself, you are rewarded with admiration here and the promise of the world to come.

The price: You cannot listen to secular music or wear jeans; you have a tyrant of a husband who, though he loves you in his fashion, mainly expects obedience, and you have no personal choice or autonomy; you cannot ever look into the eyes of any other man.

In the lives most of us live, these are false choices. As offered to us in Felix and Meira, the main character’s intimate struggle on the horns of this dilemma is delicately told, and the effect is meditatively absorbing in this independent Canadian film directed by Maxime Giroux.

It is now playing at the Criterion on Temple Street through Thursday.

In the film, Meira (Hadas Yaron) is a young Hasidic wife and mother, barely more than a child bride herself. She longs for a larger world and begins an affair with Felix (Martin Dubrueil), a secular, non-Jewish, 40-ish luftmensch who lives in her neighborhood and has made few human connections in his life. Felix’s father, whom Felix believes always has hated him, dies as the film opens, leaving him just enough of an inheritance to sustain an aimless life punctuated by deep pain and grief.

Felix’s and Meira’s eyes, hands, and tortured souls meet on the common ground of trying to overcome Death in its various forms, both the effects of the real thing and the living variety of powerfully stifled passions.

Despite the extreme set up — most Hasidic communities offer some apertures to the world and and most secular people have some grounding and anchoring in family, faith, or vocation — this movie offers many pleasures, if few answers.

Chief among the pleasures for me is an intimate tour of structured religious life, in this case (I believe) of the Satmar Hasidic community. Among the details new to me: Meira’s husband Shulem (played powerfully by Luzer Twersky) sleeps with a jar, water, and carefully folded fresh towel beside his bed. Why? Forget walking to the bathroom. To make holy the very first acts of the new day upon waking, he leans over his bad and washes his hands while reciting the appropriate blessing.

Both he and Meira also wear white bed garments, white caps, and head coverings. Although a married couple with a baby, they sleep in twin beds.

As the women flit from room to room in the tightly photographed, claustrophobic interiors of the houses of this world, they put their fingers to each and every one of the mezuzahs on the door jambs of each room and offer a chaste kiss. It’s an act of devotion and, from Meira’s perspective, a reminder of a kind of Jewish Big Brother monitoring her behavior, all in the same gesture.

The closeness can tilt over into the clinical, though there’s too much affection for the film to become voyeuristic. As director, Giroux also knows how to plant a seed and harvest it visually later. The extreme modesty of Hasidic women makes Meira’s adulterous deed, as it develops stage by stage, a kind of almost-striptease of self-willed, religious deprogramming.

It is very daring and quietly exciting stuff. When she and Felix are finally alone, in the back-lit window seat of his father’s death-haunted townhouse, Felix moves toward her across a tiny increment of space. You suspect that here, now, finally, there will be the first kiss, the first forbidden gesture. Meira says she must go. But Felix touches the back of his hand to Meira’s cheek. She stays. He moves his hand lovingly over her lips, and then back up toward her ear, like a spelunker. Meira says nothing, but remains.

What happens next is truly amazing. Felix is not after kissing. What his hand does, as he sits beside her, is lift up Meira’s beautiful hair. Of course, her hair doesn’t even belong to her; following custom, she is wearing a wig. With it removed, Meria looks even more beautiful, a haunting shorn Joan of Arc, or a teenage Jean Seberg.

The visual signature of the film’s quietness are the many scenes, especially those that take place in Meira’s world, where we view the interior of the house on the sabbath, as if looking through a Vermeer composition: peeking through the door into an interior space, and then an interior to that, into the orderliness of secrets. Except for a facile bringing together of the two plot lines toward the end of the movie — Shulem the violated husband is instrumental in Felix’s gaining knowledge that his father, in a final letter, asks forgiveness — this movie is sure-footed and in no rush whatsoever.

Yet on the question the film raises about Meira’s choice between a life of structure or of freedom, the film offers no straightforward conclusions. After Meira is found out, Shulem stalks Felix and beats him up, but the affair resumes. We really never quite know how it will end. Giroux achieves this by having created, in parts, a virtually silent film, as we watch the characters look at each other without speaking, their faces telling or hiding their thoughts. As they say over at Fox News, this movie only reports, very beautifully. The viewer must decide.

Sign up for our morning newsletter

Don't want to miss a single Independent article? Sign up for our daily email newsletter! Click here for more info.


Post a Comment

Commenting has closed for this entry

Comments

There were no comments