living apart
by Douglas Messerli
Heidi Ewing and Rachel
Grady (directors) One of Us / 2017
A few years ago, I reviewed Paul Mazursky’s telling of his visit at the annual
celebration of Hasidic Jews in the Ukraine, Yippee: A Journey to Jewish
Joy, in which he presented that gathering as a joyful and happy affair. But
after watching Heidi Ewing’s and Rachel Grady’s One of Us yesterday,
we are forced to perceive the insularity and isolation of, at least the
Brooklyn Hasidic, as hinting at a far darker view of this group, who have kept
their identity and religious principles primarily by blocking themselves off
from the rest of society.
To those who firmly believe, of course, and are willing to sacrifice their
personal identities in order to sustain their faith, I am sure that such
community closeness must offer great joy. But for those among them who question
or doubt, life within such a community it may not only be stifling, but
absolutely dangerous.
Etty’s tale is perhaps the most painful. For the first half of the film she has
clearly asked the directors to shield her face, as she terrifyingly describes
the situation to the police on a 911 call: “There’s people banging down the
door. There’s adult men outside and I’m alone with my children,” she anxiously
tells the operator. “They’re my husband’s family. The police just left a few
minutes ago. They escorted my husband out and he called family and friends to
bang on the door. This is very dangerous.”
Later Etty not only allows her face to be shown but describes the limited
education that her children have received, with textbooks blacking out all
images of women, and delimiting all information that does conform with the
group’s faith. By the end of her gut-wrenching tale the lawyers hired by the
Hasidic community have convinced the judge to take away her children,
But all of these three have a hard time of it. Luzer who lives out of an
off-road camper, suggests that the group purposely isolates their members so
that they simply cannot escape. They can’t know the world “out there,” and so
are dependent on the group. It is clear that, even though he has begun to make
a new life, it is difficult to adjust the changes his life has entailed.
Although Ari’s family seems in closer touch, and he finally does find a way to
cure himself of his cocaine addiction, by film’s end he and we are still not
sure how he might get on with his life. Uneducated in many ways, these
individuals have few choices for getting good jobs.
We know that, because of their obvious dress and their
insular lives, the Hasidic Jews were devastated by the Holocaust, and it is
hard to blame them for fearing those outside their closed community. But as
Ewing and Grady make clear in this probing documentary, they have now closed
off their world almost as aggressively as the Nazis sought to close theirs.
Keeping away from the rest of the world and locking up their sons and daughters
into a dark closet of conservative denial has, perhaps, transformed a
sustaining faith into a cult not so very different from the Christian
fundamentalists the same directors documented in their previous film, Jesus
Camp. At least these three individuals have now truly joined “us,” a world
of almost impossible diversity.
Los Angeles, November
11, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2017)
No comments:
Post a Comment