Mortification

Ha-Sodot (The secrets)

Crit

Starting with a funeral and ending with a wedding, this only occasionally goes where you expect it to, and then not by the expected path. The one consistent theme is the role of woman in Orthodox Israeli society, but along the way we also visit love and tears, selfishness and denial, guilt and atonement, kabbala and klezmer. Some scenes seem familiar--the secret mystical ritual from the teen spook film, the fumbling embrace from the lesbian awakening film, the fiancé pontification from every New Comic plot ever--but in context they're all fresh, since all are in service of the central question: what can life in this world hold for a young woman who knows she's smarter than every man around, with the progressively less persuasive exception of her father (and who has in any case seen the consequences for her mother even of her well-meaning father's smothering love)?

Thankfully, the film makes no attempt at definitive answers to any of its questions (well, aside from the fiancé's being irredeemably assholish and well dismissed).