SOF 43 / September 2000 SOF 43 / September 2000 KADUSI a film fy Amos Gif Chicken Run may be good for a laugh and Topsy-Turvy good for a song to sing-o, but TIM woopbDcockK has been frequenting the art-houses where he discovered Kadosh, directed by Amos Citai a woman’s place...
Kadosh means “sacred”, and Amos Gitai’s film examines the lives of the Jews of Jerusalem’s Mea Shearim district, who live strictly according to the Talmud.
The central story is strong: two sisters, Rivka and Malka, Rivka in a lacklustre but happy marriage to Meir, and Malka who is on the cusp of a reluctant marriage to Yossef, and less enamoured with what Orthodoxy has to offer her. She can imagine a life outside the religious community. Despite her romantic ties to Yaakov, a “bit of rough” who left to join the army, Malka feels obliged to say yes to Yossef, for she is pretty and eligible and running out of excuses.
But Gitai draws back from individual characters to study what he calls the “human landscape” - the general community, the structures, the rituals. The tone of detached observation is established by the opening scene which shows Meir getting up and dressing laboriously (and in the prescribed way), praying methodically before going to the synagogue. His wife Rivka dozes in the single bed opposite.
Gitai made the actors - who were mostly ethnic, but not religious, Jews - do evening prayers for the three months of filming. There is as much attention paid to capturing the strange texture of life in Mea Shearim as to the individual lives. The exteriors were shot on location and the film is, for the most part, shot in the middle distance, not close-up.
So back to Meir and Rivka who, after ten years of marriage, have no children. It is a source of shame, something that casts doubt on their purity, despite the couple’s orthodox Orthodoxy. According to the rabbi: “The only task of women is to bring children into the world, for men it is to study the Torah”. A secular and scientific worldview cannot imagine that moral purity can be equated with success in producing babies, but for them it is the best explanation of why Rivka cannot conceive.
What is fascinating is that the insistence on the ancient duty of going forth and multiplying comes very close to the contemporary view that 60-year-old women and gay couples have the right to have children - no matter what the barriers. In this case it seems that, biologically speaking, Rivka is not to blame. She visits a gynaecologist - a controversial act in itself - who cannot see any problems with her, and suggests that Meir has his sperm tested - an impossibility unless they can find a way that doesn’t entail masturbation. But theologically, culturally, ideologically, Rivka is to blame - she is a woman who cannot fulfil her primary function and this, according to cruel custom, is grounds for divorce. Meir promises to stand by her, but such is the power of religion that they are forced to separate. He takes another wife; she rents a single room.
Meanwhile the marriage between Yossef the zealot and Malka the free spirit becomes as tense and unhappy as you'd expect... But I’m not giving away more of the plot.
It is hard to know what to do with this story. To say it is about true love being thwarted by tradition is to use anachronistic standards. To say it is about women being crushed in a patriarchal system is only a partial explanation. The main merit of Kadosh is that it takes on a subject that mainstream cinema ignores, documenting an archaic way of life without becoming caricature or polemic.
As Amos Gitai observed in an interview with Sight and Sound, “Theologically, since in Judaism you don’t have a human representative of God on earth and there is no centralised authority, it’s a rather anarchic structure”.
Which is rather sympathetic to an SoF understanding of spirituality. But the film-maker added: “So you have a lot of people who claim to be the real representative”. Which isn't.
Tim Woodcock is editor of Movement, the SCM magazine ) =e | a I'S A STEAL!