By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO―Canadian director Naomi Jaye recalls her grandmother telling her how much she feared being buried alive and demanded that her son, Naomi’s father, promise to prick her in the hand with a pin to make sure she was dead before interring her body.
The film The Pin is built around this premise. In the course of fulfilling his shift as a shomer (David Fox) for a chevra kadisha, a Jewish burial society, Jacob watches over the shrouded corpse of a recently deceased woman. When her arm slips out from under the sheet, he recognizes her hand as that of Leah, a young woman with whom he hid in a dilapidated barn to evade the Germans during World War Two.
Uncovering her body, he flashes back to his memories of the terrible circumstances which nurtured a tender love between Leah (Milda Gecaite) and his younger self (Grisha Pasternak). Throughout the film, entombment looms as a potential fate as Jacob crawls out of an outcropping of tree roots, digs out of a mass grave where his family and community have been dumped, and conceals himself along with Leah under floorboards in the barn. A grayish pall dulls the vibrant green of the countryside, the blue sky, and the sunlight broken into stripes by the shadows cast by wooden slats as it streams into the barn. Long takes filled with silence accentuate the isolation of the two fugitives.
Adolescent affection, the constant danger of being discovered, and the shared trauma of having survived while loved ones perished forge a bond between Jacob and Leah. Their love evolves slowly from an early bout of intercourse that is animalistic to a gentle consummation after they have married themselves in a Jewish ceremony utilizing the meager resources available in the barn. When a peasant boy happens upon them, they diverge over whether his silence should be earned through compassion or guaranteed through death.
For the shomer, each scene between the younger Jacob and Leah triggers memories of the intensity of their ephemeral encounter. He recounts to her a fairy tale of a prince who in the act of protecting his future bride accidentally killed her with a sword. She prefers to impose a happier ending on the story, but expresses her dread of being buried alive and exacts his pledge to stab her with a pin before her funeral. At the end, the shomer fulfills her wish.
The Pin is the first Canadian movie to be made in Yiddish. It simply illustrates the capacity of human beings to create heaven in the midst of hell. If you savor films which pay more attention to ambiance and characterization than action and pacing, you will be nourished by The Pin.
The Pin opens at the Gaslamp Stadium, 701 Fifth Avenue, on November 1st.
Lawrence Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted at Lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com