"Felix and Meira" review: An atheist and a Hasidic woman find romance

Hadas Yaron stars as Meira, a Hasidic Jewish woman who is married with a child and in search of something new. She falls in love with Felix, (Martin Dubreull) an eccentric and penniless francophone whose wealthy father is dying. (Provided by Meta Films)

by Peter Debruge, Variety
Posted: 05/14/2015 09:13:02 AM MDTAdd a Comment
Updated: 05/14/2015 09:14:17 AM MDT

Felix, a middle-aged atheist adrift without family ties, and Meira, a young Hasidic woman feeling lost and smothered under nearly the opposite circumstances, find tentative connection in one another in Canadian director Maxime Giroux's somberly seductive "Felix and Meira." Though set in present-day Montreal, this tender romance unfolds like an episode from another century, paying the sort of careful attention to social boundaries you'd expect to find in a classic forbidden-love novel.

The latest in a small run of films with narrative ties to the Hasidic community, "Felix and Meira" suggests that its characters would be happier if given more freedom and fewer restrictions — as John Turturro's "Fading Gigolo" playfully demonstrated earlier this year. More surprising was Rama Burshtein's "Fill the Void," which respectfully details a woman's reasons for embracing conservative Judaism. "Felix and Meira" shares lead actress Hadas Yaron with that film, but reverses her character's trajectory.

Meira lives in a state of quiet unhappiness, her world confined to the few blocks of her insular Mile End neighborhood, where hipsters and Hasidim meet. It's cold and overcast this time of year — a feel reflected in Sara Mishara's dreary, underlit lensing, which often obscures faces amid murky brown shadows. Trudging the sidewalks with her infant daughter, Meira isn't like the other Orthodox wives, who see it as their duty to bear their husbands as many children as possible. Instead, she sneaks birth-control pills and sings along to a forbidden record when she has the house to herself (another nod to the film's slightly out-of-time quality).

Giroux, who isn't Jewish but lived in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood, seems to have gravitated toward such a character because she represents a rare case — in youthful Montreal, at least — of a woman living today under a centuries-old system designed to foster modesty and curb sexual temptation. Rather than holding Meira's husband accountable, the director respects the soft-spoken Shulem (Luzer Twersky) and his faith. Shulem genuinely loves his wife, and though he's frustrated by constantly having to apologize for her behavior within the community, he secretly cherishes those qualities about her which refuse to be tamed.

http://www.denverpost.com/movies/ci_28110159/an-atheist-and-hasidic-woman-find-romance-felix