Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

Avi Nesher’s The Secrets (Ha-​​Sodot)

Ancient obsta­cles, bar­ri­ers, walls. Ancient stereo­types, prej­u­dices, forced inequal­i­ties. Continue to the present day. Continue around the world. A fine Israeli film, The Secrets, explores those bar­ri­ers and shows the con­flicts within tra­di­tions, between tra­di­tions, in a fresh, often mov­ing way.

The story is not com­plex, but there are sur­prises, and those sur­prises break down walls. A bril­liant young Israeli woman, Naomi (played by Ania Bukstein), wants des­per­ately to become a Rabbi some­day, like her father. She knows that this is next to impos­si­ble, given the ancient stric­tures of her ultra-​​orthodox faith. But she also knows that she has stud­ied harder than her male peers, knows the Torah and the Talmud bet­ter than they do, and appears to be far more seri­ous about enlight­en­ment. The only bar­rier for her is her gender.

Naomi’s father has arranged a mar­riage for his daugh­ter and his best Yeshiva stu­dent. There is noth­ing there. No spark, no life. Naomi knows the stu­dent doesn’t respect her and scoffs at her ambi­tions. He scoffs per­haps out of fear. He prob­a­bly knows that she is a bet­ter stu­dent, that she is more than his equal, but can never admit as much. Shocking her father and her fam­ily, Naomi finds a way to post­pone the wed­ding and go to sem­i­nary school in Safed. Her life changes dra­mat­i­cally from that point on.

She meets her two new room­mates, Sigi and Sheine, and then a third, Michel (played by Michal Shtamler). At first, Michel is the prover­bial bull in a china shop and doesn’t fit in, doesn’t want to fit in. Originally from France, Michel ini­tially sees Safed as a back­wa­ter and des­per­ately wants to leave. But a chance encounter with a dying woman just out of prison, played by Fanny Ardant, sets in motion a project for the four young stu­dents, and a sur­pris­ing rela­tion­ship between Naomi and Michel devel­ops. Anouk, a con­victed mur­derer, seeks abso­lu­tion for her past sins, and Naomi and Michel try to bring it to her in the form of Tikkun, a way of heal­ing, repair­ing the world, using rit­ual and prayer. Sigi and Sheine join them later, which causes yet another dra­matic break.

The dynamic between Naomi and Michel is cen­tered on an awak­en­ing. Often beau­ti­ful, with a few small sur­prises, the dynamic is trans­gres­sive, but never for its own sake. The viewer believes in the rela­tion­ship between the two women, sees it as nat­ural, as a nat­ural out­come of chance, envi­ron­ment, prox­im­ity and evo­lu­tion. It is yet another secret among many, and acts as its own Tikkun. Complexity comes to the fore in the sense of direc­tions for that Tikkun. Who is the heal­ing for? Is the open-​​endedness of the process a bless­ing in itself? Who is impacted? What is lost, missed, left out?

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The spe­cial fea­tures in the DVD tell us how intense the pro­duc­tion was. Avi Nesher tried to make sure his actors all were totally immersed in their parts. We learn, for instance, that Ania Bukstein is sec­u­lar, but that she stud­ied the world of the ultra-​​orthodox intensely, read scrip­ture, dove deeply into Judaism and Kabbala for the film. Nesher tried to evoke an authen­tic world that most of us never see. The DVD doesn’t men­tion, how­ever, the beau­ti­ful music in play, in the sense that it might strike the viewer as unre­al­is­ti­cally good, almost “pro­fes­sional” in its qual­ity. The women of the sem­i­nary often sing, and their singing is won­der­ful, on key, in har­mony, and so on. It worked for me regard­less. I thought it was Nesher’s way of height­en­ing that part of real­ity and tak­ing some poetic license, in order to evoke the emo­tion of unity.

It’s a film well worth seeing .…

Trailer for The Secrets

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