If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 18/08/2017 (3340 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Menashe (Menashe Lustig), the hapless but appealing grocery clerk at the centre of this truly unusual indie film, could be called a shlemiel, a shlimazel, a shlub.

In fact, he often is called these things, because his story is performed almost entirely in Yiddish (with English subtitles). Taking us right into the middle of an ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community in Borough Park, Brooklyn, filmmaker Joshua Z Weinstein has crafted a humane and delicate drama, one combining a fascinatingly specific setting with a universal emotional effect.

Menashe is a widower with a young son. Ten-year-old Rieven (Ruben Niborski) currently lives with the family of Menashe’s late wife, headed by the prosperous, respectable and rigid Eizik (Yoel Weisshaus).

Tradition dictates Rieven cannot live with Menashe until he remarries and while this fond father longs to be reunited with his son, he remains stubbornly resistant to finding a new wife.

After an appeal to the rabbi (Meyer Schwartz), Menashe is allowed to bring Rieven to his aptly termed bachelor apartment in the week leading up to the one-year memorial of his wife’s death. Menashe tries to prove he can raise a child, a project undermined by his contrary character, his straitened circumstances and by plain bad luck.

The film works mostly as a complex character study. Menashe is a devout Jew, but also a bit of an oddball, often puzzled by the rules of his community.

His tricky position is seen during an arranged meeting with a recent widow. Menashe, clearly not ready to move on from the loss of his wife, tells her she’s not really his type.

“Your type!?” this eminently practical woman says incredulously. “You think you’re all I want in a husband?”

Weinstein constructs his story from small moments like this, with scenes that vibrate gently between drama and comedy. “Should I laugh or cry here?” a character asks at one point, a very Jewish question that hangs rather poignantly over most of the film.

Weinstein, one feels, comes to Borough Park not to judge but to quietly observe.

He adopts a neo-realist approach, drawing on his experience as a documentarian, shooting in a low-key naturalistic style and using Hasidic non-actors in most of the minor parts.

The story is also based partly on the real-life experience of Lustig, whose connection to the material and sad-clown charisma give Menashe’s scenes with his son a feeling authenticity.

Weinstein, a secular Jew who doesn’t speak Yiddish, used a translator on set. But he understands the larger language of parents and children, men and women. Looking squarely at both the demands and rewards of living in a faith-based community, he has crafted a film that is sweet but not sentimental, tender but truthful.

“I try so hard to make things right,” Menashe says at one point. And in this lovely and generous film, just trying counts for a lot.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca