"Gett - The Trial of Viviane Ansalem"

The injustice of women trapped in unhappy marriages by husbands who refuse to let them go has long been acknowledged in religious Jewish communities. If a woman cannot get a "gett," she is not officially divorced, and therefore is not free to remarry, or continue with conventional domestic life. Shlomi Elkabetz, director of the movieGett: The Trial of Viviane Ansalem, says that in Israel, the situation is even more egregious because there is no civil recourse as there is in the United States, but then again, in observant circles, the result is the same: the woman remains a social outcast, the husband free to do as he wishes.

Gett shows Viviane in a grim tribunal of unkempt rabbis. Days, months, years pass, you feel, in real-time. When I met director Shlomi Elkabetz at the Regency Hotel lobby last week, I had to say, this was the most infuriating movie I ever liked; he took my review as a compliment. The saving grace of this compelling movie about stasis is that Viviane is played by his sister, the actress Ronit Elkabetz, so memorable from the movies Late Marriage and The Band's Visit; you cannot take your eyes off her face, even as it registers stages of frustration and humiliation as the process drags on and on, and various colorful and unreliable witnesses come forward to testify on behalf of wife and husband Elisha (Simon Abkarian). He is, after all, a decent man who provides: "A nice man. A good catch."

 

This marriage was inspired by their parents'. The story, the last of a trilogy (after To Take a Wife and 7 Days), is an imaginative rendering of what might have happened if their mother had taken their father to court for a "gett." That never happened, but they are certain he would never have let her go. Happy to work together, these talented siblings -- of Moroccan origin -- split their time between Israel and France. Now audiences worldwide are lining up to see their film.

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The hypnotic “Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem” is the story of a woman wronged by men and God, if finally, in a sense, redeemed by cinema. Under Israeli law, a woman can be divorced only if her husband presents her with a religious bill of divorce called a gett (sometimes spelled get). No gett, no divorce. The long-suffering title character desperately wants to be free of her husband, who refuses to let her go. So year after year, Viviane pleads her case before a rabbinic court, waiting for her divorce as days slip into weeks and then months, her pacific face glazed with tears and her body occasionally rocked by a laugh tinged with knowing and madness.

Set in the present, “Gett” focuses on Viviane’s determined efforts to divorce her longtime husband, Elisha (Simon Abkarian), a pious man with whom she has had several children and an apparently unhappy life. As radical in its narrative conceit as it is in its secular politics, the movie takes place almost entirely inside a rabbinic court presided over by a nameless judge (Eli Gorstein) who is flanked by two others on a raised podium embellished only with an emblem of a menorah. These three bearded men in black suits and kipas stare down upon Viviane and her lawyer, Carmel (Menashe Noy), who are usually seated at a small, plain table next to a similarly humble table where Elisha is dourly parked, sometimes with his brother and advocate, Shimon (Sasson Gabay).Viviane — brought to powerful life by Ronit Elkabetz with currents of humility and hauteur — is at once a fleshed-out character, a political metaphor, a shout to heaven and earth. The movie’s title brings to mind all those novels named after their protagonists, especially women with tribulations (Jane Eyre, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina), but the word trial also almost predictably suggests Franz Kafka. It soon becomes clear why. In Israel, all divorces and marriages, even secular ones, are under the power of rabbinic courts and therefore Orthodox Jewish law. A wife who doesn’t receive a gett from her husband becomes an “agunah” — chained or anchored woman. A husband can be chained, too, although this is apparently rarer.

Although Viviane and Elisha both periodically speak — mostly to their representation and to the judges, sometimes to each other, quietly slipping between Hebrew and French — much of the talking is done for them. “Gett” is a trial narrative complete with witness testimonies and periodic admonitions from the judge, but with little of the courtroom dramatics that characterize mainstream legal stories. Nothing if not dialectical, “Gett” instead unfolds as a debate about love, marriage and human rights that turns on personal stories and philosophical asides, arguments and counterarguments. As one witness after another testifies about Viviane and Elisha’s marriage, her virtue, his rectitude, it becomes clear that divorce here isn’t a personal choice, but a matter for God and a people.

With her dramatically pale face framed by a voluptuous dark cloud of hair, Ms. Elkabetz is never more effective than when she’s holding still, her face so drained of emotion that it transforms into a screen within the screen on which another, indelibly private movie is playing. This stillness can be transfixing in close-up because the human face remains one of cinema’s great landscapes even if our screens are cluttered with banally framed head-and-shoulder shots. There’s nothing indifferent about the human face here, especially Viviane’s. That’s why every so often the filmmakers fill the screen with her face, allowing you to traverse its planes and trace its lines and, in the process, discover a woman who — even as she has been denied her freedom — retains a stubborn, transcendent humanity.This makes for gripping cinema from start to finish, almost implausibly so. “Gett” is the third movie featuring Viviane that Ms. Elkabetz has written and directed with her brother Shlomi Elkabetz, after “To Take a Wife” and “Shiva” a.k.a. “Seven Days,” and their work here is assured, streamlined and bold. As if to underscore the highly subjective quality of the storytelling in “Gett” (he said, she said, they said), the Elkabetzes use only point-of-view shots throughout, which tethers every image — of the judges, of Viviane’s legs, of Elisha’s profile — to the perspective of one of the characters. This concentrated focus underscores the personal stakes and torques the tension so that even the image of Viviane letting down her hair — and incurring the wrath of the court — becomes a tremulous action scene.