On a sidewalk crowded with people moving at the pace of a typical New York day, nobody stands out.
Eventually a man appears in the back of the frame who gradually attracts our attention. There’s nothing extraordinary about him except he’s a bulky man, and he’s laboring more than anyone else in the summer heat.
He’s wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, black vest and tsitsis (ritual fringes), and our initial impression is of an overgrown child. It’s the perfect introduction to Menashe, and “Menashe.”
We have the sense that writer-director Joshua Z. Weinstein’s camera could have followed any face in the crowd. That’s an unusual feeling to have in a fiction film, but there are eight million stories in the naked city, after all.
The effect, though, is to imbue “Menashe” from the outset with the requisite naturalism for a riveting, Yiddish-language character study of a working-class Hasid on the margins of both his religious community and society at large.
“Menashe” opens today at The Loft Cinema, co-presented by the Tucson International Jewish Film Festival.
The motor of the film is Menashe’s ham-fisted determination to raise his adolescent son, Rieven, by himself in the months following his wife’s premature death. His tenacity is understandable, for the boy and Jewish songs and scripture are Menashe’s only interests.
The religious leader, the ruv, while not unsympathetic, maintains that Rieven be raised in a “proper home” with a father and a mother. Given the unhappiness of his first, arranged marriage, Menashe (beautifully played by Menashe Lustig) is in no hurry to remarry.
So the boy lives with Menashe’s annoyingly self-assured brother-in-law Eizik (the excellent Yoel Weisshaus) and his family in a nice home instead of at Menashe’s no-frills walk-up apartment. Rieven doesn’t mind, but it’s a continuing affront to Menashe’s self-respect and sense of responsibility.
“Menashe” is the exception among the many films about Orthodox Jews in that it does not involve a tug of war between tradition and the modern world, or the conflict between secularism and faith.
The central dynamic in “Menashe” is class, which gives the viewer an unusual angle from which to view the ultra-Orthodox community. This film scarcely visits a yeshiva, and the Hasidim with the long coats like Eizik that are so familiar to us are supporting characters—although it is plain that they are at the center of community life.
Menashe, for his part, can’t get no respect. He works in a grocery market, a job with no status (regardless of how exceedingly moral he is) and low pay.
There’s a picaresque scene where he’s enticed into having a 40-ounce of cheap beer in the back of the store with a couple of Hispanic co-workers. Though the language barrier prevents Menashe from bonding with them past a certain point, he seems more comfortable in his own skin than he is with the Jews in his circle and their judgments and expectations.
Our sympathies are with Menashe, of course, as they’d be with any single parent struggling to make ends meet and get a little ahead. But he’s far from perfect, and that smart move by Weinstein is what elevates the picture to the level of pathos.
Menashe is short-tempered, stubborn, perpetually late, fond of the occasional drink(s) and always playing catch-up. He’s the last to recognize that his character flaws along with his circumstances make him the biggest obstacle to establishing a stable life with Rieven.
“Menashe” is rife with the small truths of life — every father disappoints his son at some point, and vice versa — and the amusing, unexpected moments that occur every day. It’s a warm, generous film that doesn’t shy from sentimentality but doesn’t insult its audience, either.
Ultimately, it introduces us to a memorable character whose resilience is, in its way, inspiring. “Menashe” is a small film, but it’s a special one.
(Rated PG, 82 min., Yiddish with subtitles)
