By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — Winner of the Toronto Film Festival’s Award for Best Canadian film, Felix and Meira retells what in the hands of a less subtle director than Maxime Giroux could easily degenerate into a tawdry and trite story of a Chasidic Jewish woman trapped in her faith and marriage and falling in love with a secular man who represents both her personal and religious liberation. Yet Giroux endows husband Shulem played by Luzer Twersky, his wife Malka played by Hadas Yaron from Fill the Void, and her lover Felix played by Martin Dubreuil with an emotional and moral complexity that renders this old plotline credible and compelling.
Malka is ostensibly a dutiful mother and wife, but privately she sketches pictures and plays soul music to entertain her daughter. The lyrics of the song she puts on the turntable─ Wendy Rene’s “After laughter comes tears”─ reveal her inner state. When her husband comes home early and chides her for listening to “such distortions,” she responds by feigning she is dead. She sneaks into the bathroom to take birth control pills that she has squirreled in a box of sanitary pads.
Felix is a bachelor who lives in her neighborhood. The impending death of his estranged father reminds him how lonely he has become. The first two times he meets Malka, he is merely trying to share his sense of loss. She initially shies away from him, but then encounters him in the stairway of his apartment where she is returning a drawing she has stolen from those he has posted on its walls. That moment there is the glimmering that they might have something in common despite the contrast between their lifestyles and languages. He speaks French and she Yiddish, forcing them to occasionally communicate in English.
There is not much in their immediate environments to nurture their relationship. The exterior scenes are set in the cold and slushy streets of Montreal in the winter. The interior shots convey a sense of confinement except for the mansion Felix and his sister have inherited and plan to sell. The money Felix hopes to receive will enable him to escape his solitary life. He brings Meira, the name Malka now calls herself, to the spacious villa where the two play ping pong providing her with a rare opportunity to enjoy herself without any maternal and religious responsibilities.
But nothing remains secret for long in the tight-knit Chasidic community in which Meira resides. Shulem finds out about the birth control pills and her otherwise innocuous trysts with Felix and banishes her to Brooklyn until she comes to her senses. Felix follows her there. Their romance slowly evolves from holding hands and touching her hair after she removes her wig. He introduces her to Salsa dancing and gives her a pair of jeans marveling at how beautiful she looks in them. She finds them tight, but he reminds her that she will gradually break them in, an apt metaphor for adjusting to anything new.
Shulem tracks them down and assaults Felix in a burst of uncharacteristic rage. His realization, however, of how unhappy his wife is, and his heeding the advice of a friend that Chasidism requires people to redeem the good that dwells within evil, convince him that he must permit Malka to leave if that is what she chooses. Thus, his second meeting with Felix is civil and compassionate.
Meira follows her heart and travels to Venice with Felix. I am not the first reviewer to notice that the final scene of them drifting on a gondola is reminiscent of the conclusion of The Graduate. They both have fled lives they no longer want, but whether their future lies with each other remains an open question.
The background music, be it the Klezmer clarinet riffs, a spirited rendition of “Didn’t It Rain” dynamically performed by Rosetta Tharp at a small town train depot, or Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Coat,” musically and verbally reflect the actions and the mood of what precedes them on screen. That tender gestures and glances substitute for graphic sex scenes mirrors the inhibitions and qualms Meira still has about her love towards Felix.
The movie has some heavy-handed symbolism that doesn’t fit comfortably with Giroux’s nuanced cinematic style. Malka’s fascination for the sound of mouse traps snapping, and Shulem’s comment about the cruelty of the world for a rodent killed by one struck me as obvious statements about entrapment that the director should have omitted. The scene of Felix donning a fake beard and peyot was ridiculous. Was he trying to spy on Meira or assuming a Chasidic appearance to win her over?
Yet these lapses do not detract much from what is an intelligent and involving portrayal of the obstacles lovers from two different backgrounds must overcome if they are to be together. Make some time this week to see Felix and Meira at the La Jolla Village Cinemas.
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Baron is a professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com, or you may comment on this website provided the rules below are observed.
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