Fill the Void (2012)

I watched Fill the Void (dir. Rama Burshtein) on a rainy night at the Sodankylä film festival. Perhaps this testifies to my flawed attention, but in my view, the film was overly ambiguous, and not ambiguous in the sort of way that opens up for several readings. In this case, the ambiguousness made it hard to relate to the film. Obviously, the director sees a certain urgency in a story she wants to tell. But I was never sure what this urgency was.

The story is set in Tel Aviv among a group of ultra orthodox Hasidic Jews. From what I've read, the aspiration of the director was to make a film about this group of people from the inside. I suppose that this does not exclude the possibility of a critical perspective, and this is what makes the film interesting. If anything, Fill the Void reminds us that no culture is uniform. If it criticizes certain cultural patterns, how should this be understood, should it be understood as a distinction between the religious and the cultural, or as a distinction between limiting cultural norms and a craving for independence? To be honest, I'm not sure at all, some things would speak in favor of the opposite of the latter: faith is also a way of life, not an inner conviction. The central character is Shira, 18 years old, an age at which you are expected to get married, and marriages are arranged. Everything changes when Shira's sister dies. The sister had a husband and a child. The widower is under press to re-marry, and some grief-stricken family members see Shira as a suitable match. Shira herself seems to repress her feelings; the only thing she says is that she wants to do the right thing. And it is here that my confusion appears. Is the film supposed to be a love story, so that Shira has fallen for her sister's husband, or are we to think that Shira would rather not marry the guy, but complies with the conventions to act the role of the dutiful daughter, thus repressing her desire to marry someone she loves? In part, we get to see things from the other party's perspective, the man Shira would marry tries to elicit her "real feelings" and maybe this makes my own thoughts trail off into familiar Romance Story territory (in which the usual path is to show women who are not clear about who they are, they need a male perspective). But the ending of the film thwarts this interpretation.

Fill the Void is a film that tries hard to evoke emotions, feelings that do rarely come to the surface, feelings that can only be hinted at. Ambivalence is all over, and it is painful for the characters to bear. In this, the film is rather successful, especially in how it focuses on the awkward meetings between two people who have been chosen to be a good match for each other. On the downside, the film is at times too overblown, so wrapped up within these mixed emotions that it is hard to navigate - where exactly are we heading? The excessive use of certain stylistic devices (shallow focus, soft edges, close-ups, emotional music) also felt a bit contrived.