This terrifically authentic look at life inside New York’s Yiddish-speaking Hasidic community is a bittersweet treat – a vibrantly engaging portrait of down-to-earth lives that is affectionate, amusing and ultimately very moving. A million miles removed from such peripherally comparable fare as Sidney Lumet’s A Stranger Among Us or Boaz Yakin’s A Price Above Rubies, Joshua Z Weinstein’s fiction-feature debut gets right under the skin of its characters, gently unpicking themes of social conformity and religious responsibility with melancholy wit and wry, tragicomic insight.
Populated by first-time performers playing close-to-home roles, it combines the poetry of John Cassavetes with the grit of Ken Loach, along with a touch of the cultural intimacy that Rama Burshtein brought to Fill the Void and Through the Wall.
Widower Menashe (Menashe Lustig) works in a grocery shop in the orthodox Hasidic community of Brooklyn’s Borough Park district. A schlubby yet endearingly goofy presence, he cares for his customers but irritates his boss, who finds his habitual haplessness exasperating. Since the death of Menashe’s wife, his beloved son, Rieven (Ruben Niborski), has been living with his more successful uncle, in compliance with tradition that dictates a child must grow up in a two-parent household. Menashe is in no hurry to marry again (“nothing will be the same”), yet only when he finds a match will he be allowed to resume his paternal duties. As his wife’s memorial dinner draws near, our big-hearted antihero sees a chance to prove himself to the community – preparing a fitting meal, demonstrating that he is “a mensch” and hopefully winning back his child in the process.
With his quizzical expression and dishevelled appearance, Menashe has the air of an accidental rebel, a spark of chaos amid a rigidly ordered world. “Why don’t my uncle and teacher like you?” Rieven asks his father, cutting to the core of a problem that has lost the devout yet unorthodox Menashe the respect of his peers. As his rabbi tells him, the Talmud says that the key to happiness is threefold: “Nice wife, nice house, nice dishes.” Yet Menashe refuses to play ball, throwing obstacles in the way of a new match (“You’re not my type”), thereby sabotaging his chances of regaining his son. Beyond the shoulder-shrugging stubbornness, however, lurks something more vulnerable – a guilty weight resting behind Menashe’s twinkling eyes.
Taking inspiration from the personal life of his leading man (Lustig is a widowed grocer upon whose stories the screenplay is loosely based), Weinstein draws on his experience as a documentary film-maker to conjure a drama rooted in the reality of these characters and their community. Long lenses add verite realism to the street scenes, situating this story firmly within the thriving Borough Park community, offering insight into a world that has often been hidden. “Hasidic life in Borough Park has many similarities to how my great grandparents lived outside Warsaw,” Weinstein has said, emphasising his desire to achieve “a better understanding [of] myself and my ancestors” and allowing an “audience of outsiders” to “share moments of their everyday lives that are rarely seen”.
Yet for all its cultural specificity, Menashe tells a universal story about a father-son relationship. As Rieven, first-timer Niborski is a miraculous discovery, his expressive face and lanky limbs perfectly embodying the conflicts of a young man torn between love for his father and an equally pressing need for stability. It’s not for nothing that juggling has become Rieven’s preferred pastime, a metaphor as pointed as the presence of the hatchling chick whose fate serves as a commentary upon Menashe’s parenting skills. Unsurprisingly, Weinstein cites the Dardenne brothers’ The Kid With a Bike and Vittorio de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves as touchstone texts, alongside Robert Benton’s perennial tearjerker Kramer vs Kramer.
Scenes of prayer meetings have an unobtrusive immediacy, while a sequence in which Menashe drinks with his Hispanic workmates seems touchingly truthful. A sparse, plaintive score by Aaron Martin and Dag Rosenqvist (interspersed with bursts of spontaneous song) lends an air of yearning, subtly implying transcendence amid these day-to-day travails. Weinstein finishes on an ambiguous note, after which I was left with memories of Menashe teaching his son to roar like a lion, and watching him play as twilight fell upon these streets – haunting and beautiful, full of laughter and sadness.
