Unorthodox

Amos Gitai's Kadosh

by Scott Heller

KADOSH. Directed by Amos Gitai. Screenplay by Amos Gitai, Eliette Abecassis, and Jacky Cukier. Starring Yael Abecassis, Yoram Hattab, Meital Barda, Uri Ran Klausner, and Sami Hori. A Kino International release. At the Avon.

By the pale purple light of morning, Meir, an Orthodox Jew in Jerusalem, performs the rituals that begin his day. Director Amos Gitai opens Kadosh, his powerful drama of religious intolerance,

by forcing viewers to slow down and adjust to the pace of a contemplative life. For more than five uninterrupted minutes, we watch Meir dress and pray. His wife barely stirs in her sleep, seemingly somewhere else as her husband concludes with the daily prayer thanking God that he was not born a woman.

Israeli movies aren't known for their subtlety, but Gitai remains a pleasing -- and prolific -- anomaly. The director's challenging documentaries, more essays than journalism, have earned him an international reputation. His cerebral style infiltrates even his fictional works, which often have real-life elements. Kadosh, which details the painful double standards that Orthodox women face in contemporary Jerusalem, has a ripped-from-the-headlines immediacy. The long takes and the deliberate pacing mark it as a Gitai film, but the story's focus on quiet suffering give Kadosh the intensity of an old-fashioned melodrama.

The film follows two sisters, the pious Rivka (Yael Abecassis) and the more impetuous Malka (Meital Barda). For 10 years, Rivka has been a good wife to Meir (Yoram Hattab), but she has not borne him a child. Malka resists the path set before her, but she can't quite screw up the courage to marry outside the closed community of ultra-religious Jews in Mea Shearim, a section of Jerusalem. Although infatuated with a secular musician (Sami Hori), she is betrothed to Yossef (Uri Ran Klausner), a boorish student for whom she feels nothing.

Yossef and Meir spend their days praying and studying in a bare-bones yeshiva. Bound together by Scripture, they remain a contrasting pair. Meir, with his hooded eyes and high forehead, smolders -- first for God and learning, and only after for the woman nearby. Yossef is a brute and a buffoon. Several times we watch him venture outside the bounds of the tight-knit community. Weaving through traffic in his car, he bellows through a loudspeaker, calling on secular Jews to return to the religious fold.

Whereas Malka's choice -- the rock star or the schlemiel -- is the stuff of potboilers, Rivka's fate is more intense, and more painful. Rabbis in the community are urging Meir to divorce her, since according to Jewish law she has failed her wifely duties by not producing a child. The actors make a stunning, timeless couple, yet even their languorous private moments together are tinged with sadness. Torn between personal affection and devotion to a higher faith, Meir seems to carry a burden with every gesture, until finally he makes the awful decision to choose the law over his own heart.

Kadosh concludes the director's trilogy on contemporary Israel as seen through its major cities. Devarim (1995) chronicled Tel Aviv life; Yom Yom (1997) was a sluggish drama set in multicultural Haifa. In interviews Gitai has claimed that the new film is a challenge to all three of Jerusalem's major monotheistic religions and their attitudes towards women. Maybe so, but the film's artillery is aimed squarely at ultra-Orthodox Jews, who from within their cloister are hungry for political and cultural power.

Although the director comes to indict, he wisely keeps his focus tight and personal. Rivka learns that her fertility isn't the problem, but she has so completely internalized her subordinate status that she keeps the news to herself. Family rituals that should be joyous are quietly horrifying: Malka showing off her one-size-fits-all wedding dress; the marriage celebration, which plays like a dance of the living dead; and her wedding night, which is among the ugliest depictions of sex I've ever seen on screen.

The director might have stopped there, or at several other moments in the last third of the film; instead he indulges in one twist too many, so that Kadosh culminates in a grandiose final reckoning it doesn't really need. Until then, in a voice as steady as a prayer, Amos Gitai has delivered an anguished cry for the women of Israel who suffer, behind closed doors, in silence.