Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (opening Friday at Landmark Theatres) is an eloquent and imaginative staging of institutionalized �" in fact, mandatory �" misogyny in Israel. But it's also an urgent reminder that all progress towards human rights remains completely subjective in the eyes of the beholder.
Gett, from the brother/sister team of Shlomi and Ronit Elkabetz, begins in the present in an Israeli court, where all three judges are rabbis. Technically the third film in a trilogy, Gett comes with an expository prologue that quickly puts us in the picture. For those unacquainted with modern-day Israel, where only rabbis can marry or grant divorce, Gett will play like Alice in Wonderland just after our heroine disappears down the rabbit hole, or The Wizard of Oz just as Dorothy's house lands on the witch. The filmmakers employ a complex time structure whereby the proceedings are glimpsed in quick gulps from a timeline that stretches over five years. The drama is like a card game that only men are entitled to win.
"What does she want?"
"A divorce, Your Honor."
"What are the grounds for divorce?"
"She doesn't love him anymore."
"That's no ground for divorce!"
"I'm not going back!"
"We'll see about that!" (Or, "Off with her head!" screams The Red Queen.)
While part of Gett's effectiveness relies on the claustrophobia of its one-set courtroom, we soon hanker to see and hear from the couple's four kids. The biological brother who turns on Viviane is good but essentially a one-trick-pony. For better or worse, Gett is compelled to showcase an Israel that feels far more in tune with its feudally constituted Arab and Persian neighbors. It's as if I told you that LGBT progress in America were suddenly up to a conclave of Orthodox Brooklyn rabbis.
In A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers' mischief-making slice of 1967 "Minnesota Nice," a restless married college physics professor, Larry Gopnik (a brilliant nebbish turn from Michael Stuhlbarg), is dumped by his gett-seeking hausfrau Judith (a briskly assertive Sari Lennick), who's seduced by Larry's bombastic colleague, a pushy, upscale wine-imbibing widower.
Larry: "Esther is barely cold!"
Judith: "Esther died three years ago. And it was a loveless marriage. Sy wants a gett."
"A what?"
"A ritual divorce. He says it's very important. Without a gett, I'm an agunah."
"A what? What are you talking about?"
"You always act so surprised. I have begged you to see the Rabbi."
At its best, Gett reminds us that much of the world, particularly "the Holy Land," is still ruled by instincts as atavistic as religious. Few LGBT viewers will miss the irony that Viviane's very real third-act "victory," getting free of her viciously manipulative husband, thus avoiding being declared a "non-person" by the rabbis and viewed as unfit to remarry, comes at the price of her dignity and rights as an Israeli citizen. One effective late-film device is having Viviane, her anger mounting over the court's obvious bias towards her husband, wear a bright red dress and free her long dark hair from its imprisoning braids. In conservative Jewish circles, a woman's hair and clothing are viewed as a dangerous part of her power to seduce the unwary male �" in other words, like the garb of a prostitute.
In A Serious Man, the Coens position Larry Gopnik's pot-smoking son (the snarky-witty Aaron Wolf: "What's sodomy, Dad?") as a vital cog in his dad's undoing. Gett 's successful third act could have benefited from cameos from the couple's four kids, to evaluate where they really stood in the domestic tug-of-war between Dad's self-serving religiosity and Mom's more soul-satisfying declaration of conscience. For me, it was a second viewing of Gett that reinforced the film's possibly unintentional but real message that America is still one of the few bastions of freedom from religion.