Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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36 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Actors try, but director's simpleminded attack on Orthodox, May 8, 2002
The DVD interviews are extremely revealing. The actors (themselves secular Israelis) love the challenge of playing fundamentalist ultra-Orthodox Jews and manage to convey a true pathos for the characters and their lives. Their attempt to find beauty and integrity in the characters, and their sympathetic portrayals, are admirable but paradoxical, because the script is stacked against this attempt. The writer/director makes clear in his dvd interview: Orthodox Judaism and the Talmud are, according to him, clearly out to debase women. He chooses the most anti-woman quotations from the Talmud (certainly using a search engine) and composes a plot and shallow fundamentalists to mouthe the lines. In the interview, he claims all monotheistic religions are by nature anti-woman [unlike the Greeks, Romans, Assyrians, Egyptians,... ???] and that fundamentalists are people too shallow "to experience spirituality in the world without ritual" as he does. He admits making the film as an attack on the religious right in Israel.In sum, the actors' sensitive portrayals make the first half of the film truly interesting, but the second half is all contrived preachiness, ruining what could have been a balanced critique and portrayal of women in this culture.
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43 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A rare glimpse into the world of Orthodox Jewry in Isreal, February 24, 2001
This is an Israeli film that deals with the forbidden subject of ultra-orthodox Jewry. Filmed with excruciating attention to detail, the daily rituals and total immersion in the faith are deeply explored.The word "Kadosh" means sacred and this film is basically the love stories of two sisters who are trapped in this very constricting world. Rifka, the older sister, is sweetly in love with her husband of ten years. There is deep and gentle feeling between them and they take joy in each other. Problem is, they have no children, and according to Orthodox law, the husband must take another wife. Malka, the younger sister, cannot marry the former soldier and guitar player who she loves because he has left the community. She becomes the victim of an arranged marriage to a brutal over-zealous fundamentalist who I can only characterize as a religious nut-job. The wedding night is horrendous and depicted with startling detail and I found myself crying. I saw this film in a theater, and when I glanced at the woman sitting next to me, she was crying too. The writer and director, Amos Gitai, is a secular Israeli and is clearly depicting Orthodox Jews in a negative way. I wish the film would be more balanced. Surely, there are people who live that way without the sad unhappiness that permeates this film. Several years ago I read a novel called "The Romance Reader" by Pearl Abraham. It, too, was about the restrictions imposed in her small Hasidic community. However, not everyone saw the restrictions the same way, and there was a lot of love and caring in the community. Most of this film was shot indoors, in apartments and synagogues with crumbling walls. I wondered if there was even plumbing in the buildings. Other scenes showed the crowded winding streets of Jerusalem packed with traffic. Some of the scenes were also a little too long for my taste. But the director certainly did capture the anguish of these two women as they struggled in their own ways to deal with their lives. The atmosphere throughout is sad and morose but I do recommend this video. The public knows little, or nothing, about this particular world; this film provides rare glimpse of it.
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11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Inaccurate but..., December 11, 2005
I grew up in modern orthodox judaism in England and studied at an ultraorthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem close to where the movie was set, have ultraorthodox relatives etc. but am now secular myself. A lot of the ritual aspects of the movie especially the scenes in the synagogue/yeshiva were inaccurate. I couldn't determine if they were Sephardi (Middle Eastern Jews) or Ashkenazi (European Jews) - some bizarre mix in the middle - Meah She'arim is a primarily Ashkenazi neighborhood. The wedding was the most bizarre... . Perhaps the producers were short of money to hire extras. The whole feel was very unrealistic as a result.
To an outsider a lot of the context wouldn't be clear as can be seen from some of the other commentaries here. The overall themes though if more contextualized aren't totally out of place at all, though I know it is an anti-Orthodox movie, but these are important issues. However, the end result is really messed up and detracts from getting the message across.
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