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Two Very Different Reviews

[This week's Notes to Readers is more extensive than usual and readers may wish to start there.  You will need to scroll down to the right date, so keep "June 23, 2013" in mind as you're doing so.]



Fill the Void (Sony Pictures Classics, Rama Burshtein, 2012)

This very interesting film is Israel's official 2012 entry for Best Foreign Language Film. The story involves the agony through which an Orthodox Jewish family goes following the death in childbirth of their eldest daughter. The family is faced with a dilemma -- will the younger sister marry the widower and keep the family together, thereby dashing her own hopes of an impending marriage with a more suitable contemporary? If she will not, the bereaved husband will remarry and relocate to Belgium with their first grandchild. The movie explores this difficult situation in the context of an authentically portrayed Hassidic sect.

The film is extremely well reviewed and here are links to reviews by Walter Addegio for the San Francisco Chronicle and A. O. Scott for the New York Times (NYT Critics Pick).

I’ll leave the technical aspects of film criticism to the “pros” as my interest in the movie actually stems from another aspect of its production.

There is a tendency to protray the Orthodox in the media as extremists and crazies. Even the Orthodox blogs I follow (Dovbear and Frumsatire) tend to focus on the more extreme aspects of Orthodox Jewish life. [Readers who are interested in reviews of Dovbear and Frumsatire will find them here and here.]  Thus this movie is notable in its portrayal of the Orthodox family in crisis as normal, decent people struggling with a terribly difficult situation. It is very much to the credit of the writer/director, Rama Burshtein, that she creates, as her initial effort, an absolutely first rate drama using such a tableaux as her canvas.

Readers interested in the subject of extreme characterizations of Jews, most typically by other Jews, might want to take a look at my piece entitled Op-Ed! (No. 1), my first op-ed in the “J,” the local Jewish community newspaper, along with its predecessor blog piece, Mishigas Is (Very Much) In The Eye Of The Beholder.

For local readers, Fill the Void is currently playing as an exclusive engagement at the Clay Theater, 2261 Filmore Street, San Francisco (corner of Fillmore and Clay). According to the Landmark Theatres website, run times are 2:40, 4:45, 7:00 and 9:10 p.m.

Highly recommended.

Black Watch



This is a very different type of dramatic presentation from Fill the Void.

Black Watch is a play produced under the auspices, in San Francisco, of ACT (American Conservatory Theater). The play addresses the dissonance, and ultimate breakdown in morale, of one of Britain’s most famous infantry regiments, the former 42nd (Highland) Regiment of Foot, also known to British military history as the “Black Watch,” when the regiment was posted to Iraq. The individual soldiers of the regiment find that their preconceptions of the military life and of their sense of duty sorely tested in combat conditions of a type they had never experienced before and which were outside the parameters of the regiment’s storied military history. Dealing with a faceless enemy who did not hesitate to blow himself up along with his adversaries ultimately makes members of the regiment question why they are fighting such a war and what the role of the military is in such a conflict.

Again, there is much that can be said about the play from a technical standpoint. It was daring of ACT to stage the play in the former National Guard Armory at 14th and Mission Street (although from a user-friendly standpoint I have to note that the seating was none too comfortable and the two-hour no-intermission format seemed unnecessary). There are pyrotechnics a plenty and lots of big and small bangs. I think in fairness that the play can be faulted for being overlong. But it got, deservedly, rave reviews, from Robert Hurwitt of the San Francisco Chronicle. (As local viewers may recognize, the “little man” is jumping out of his seat, and I think rightly so.)

But, again, there is another point to be emphasized. America has been at war in Iraq and/or Afghanistan for over 12 years. Yet I have never seen a war that has touched so large a segment of the American population so little. While it almost certainly is different in the American South, which supplies a disproportionate number of the soldiers comprising our standing army, not to mention the military families found more broadly throughout the country, for many Americans, it is as if the wars in the Middle East never took place. We don’t encounter veterans who fought in those wars; we don’t see the casualties, nor the families devastated by the loss of their loved ones on obscure foreign battlefields. For that reason, if for no other, Black Watch matters – it brings home the type of war that is being fought, including how nameless and faceless it is.

Black Watch is a production of the National Theatre of Scotland. Judging from the National Theatre webpage, it appears to have finished its international tour for this year. Hopefully it will be back. Whether it is or not, it is a powerful reminder to Americans not to ignore a war that has festered for over a dozen years and taken a terrible, even if often hidden toll on civil society.

Highly recommended.