Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem begins in a courtroom, and, like 12 Angry Men, never leaves it. But unlike Reginald Rose’s morality play, there are no heroic shifts in conscience or unequivocal denunciations of prejudice in this legal drama. Instead, we become the voyeurs of a wrenching case study of religious chauvinism masquerading as proper litigation, a tunnel of dogmatic darkness whose light, for Viviane Amsalem, grows dimmer with each passing scene.
The case in question involves the dissolution of a marriage, and the title character (Ronit Elkabetz)’s Sisyphean task of obtaining a “gett,” or a divorce, sanctioned through the courts. Her husband, Elisha (Simon Abkarian), is a deeply Orthodox man who wed a 15-year-old Viviane in an arranged marriage. Thirty years have passed, and their uncoupling is anything but conscious, let alone amicable. She’s a secular woman who works as a hairdresser to continue to support their (mostly grown) children. Loveless, sexless and uncommunicative, Viviane and Elisha have lived apart for some time, but until her gett can be made official, she is still tethered to a life of misery.
It quickly becomes clear that the kangaroo court is stacked against her, run as it is by three devout men with beards and yarmulkes, who utter exhortations like “know your place, woman!” A cavalry of witnesses enter the cramped, fluorescent-lit courtroom to testify to the husband’s wisdom and saintliness, his religion paraded for legal immunity. And, after all, it’s not like Elisha beat her or cheated on her, so what’s the big deal?
Even when Elisha shows contempt of court by refusing to show up to trial time and again, the judges give him a pass, continuing to kick the proverbial can down the patriarchal road. Months pass, then years — five full years, in fact, of infuriating stasis, during which Viviane grows weary, flaunting the prudish court by switching from funereally modest dresses to more stylish red outfits that show off her legs and open-toed shoes that reveal — gasp! — painted toenails.
Gett is a necessarily talky movie that would make a fine play in the right hands. But its visual austerity has virtuosic big-screen predecessors, like the chamber dramas of late-period Bergman and the unflagging historical accuracy of Robert Bresson’s The Trial of Joan of Arc. The Bresson film was written from actual court transcripts, and Gett, penned by Ronit Elkabetz and her brother and director, Shlomi, feels similarly drawn from case files.
Also like the Bresson drama, there is very little staging in Gett. Until the very end, movements are limited to spatial transitions from the courthouse waiting room to the drab courtroom, and actions are comprised mostly of stuffing court documents into satchels. The only sound is the occasional typewriter clatter of the court’s plodding stenographer. By never granting us a comforting cutaway to a domestic scene or even a breath of fresh air, Shlomi Elkabetz places us always in Viviane’s headspace, where life is an endless prison whose wardens are former friends, lovers and the Israeli (in)justice system.
Text appears regularly onscreen, informing us of the movie’s interminable timeline: “Two months later, five months later, six months later”), yet nothing changes. It would be like being trapped in a Sartre or Kafka story if it wasn’t so painfully drawn from everyday reality. This might sound depressing, but the film is so addictively watchable that you won’t want to look away, and it’s leavened by plenty of dark humor, which arrives at the expense of the maddening cultural and religious clashes of the characters and witnesses.
Because, as much as Gett is a compelling story of one woman attempting to liberate herself from the shackles of one man, it’s also a composite of countless such cases in just about any nation where religion trumps women’s self-actualization. Viviane’s plight is not far removed from that of Leila Hatami’s character in the Iranian masterpiece A Separation. Religious bigotry is religious bigotry.
But the division of modern Israeli life, between the powerful Orthodox minorities and the often-powerless secular majority, has not, to my eyes, been filmed with such conviction and insight. Not everyone will like what they see, but everyone should see it.
GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANE AMSALEM. Director: Shlomi Elkabetz; Cast: Ronit Elkabetz, Menashe Noy, Simon Abkarian, Sasson Gabai; in Hebrew with English subtitles; Distributor: Music Box; Rating: Not rated; Opens: Friday at Movies of Lake Worth, Lake Worth Playhouse, Movies of Delray, Living Room Theaters at FAU, the Classic Gateway Theater in Fort Lauderdale, Cinema Paradiso Hollywood, and the Last Picture Show in Tamarac.