'My Father My Lord': Intense beliefs create conflict between father, son
Intense beliefs create conflict between father, son
“My Father My Lord” is a short, quiet but deeply felt and at times intense film.
It’s for acting fans rather than action fans, with superb, highly naturalistic and moving performances by its three leads. The film, which won the 2007 Israeli Academy Awards for best direction and best cinematography, takes the viewer right into the world of a “Haredi” (ultra-Orthodox) Jewish family in Israel. They are part of a highly insular community in which spirituality and strict traditional observance guide everyday life.
The ways of the ultra-Orthodox are not explained here, which means that many of their customs and practices will be puzzling for most viewers. However, this very mystery and exoticness may also appeal to some moviegoers and give them patience with the thoughtful pace of “My Father.”
The Haredi culture is one that director David Volach knows well, having grown up in Israel as one of 19 — count ’em, 19 — children in a family in an ultra-Orthodox community. Volach ultimately left that community, a rejection that is reflected in his film. However, his critique of Haredi views — represented by the rabbi whose little family we follow — is made with an unusual and fascinating subtlety.
There are no monsters or tyrants, here; in fact, it’s clear that Rabbi Abraham Eidelman (played by Assi Dayan, son of the late Israeli military leader Moshe Dayan) is a good man and a loving father.
The movie opens with a scene of Rabbi Abraham, a man in his early 60s with requisite long beard and forelocks (locks of hair on each side of the forehead that are never shorn, in literal accordance with the Torah), breaking into anguished crying as he reads in his study. With great effort, he composes himself and walks to the
d
front of the sanctuary to lead services. Before he begins, he looks sadly over at a gold memorial plaque on the chair at the end seat of a row, and we see the name Menahem Eidelman.
From there, the camera backtracks out of the synagogue — a device that turns out to be Volach’s unusually subtle way of starting a flashback. Menahem (Ilan Grif), we learn, was the only son of Rabbi Abraham and his 40- ish wife, Esther. We meet him as an adorable little boy of around 7 who’s doted on by his loving mother and has a natural fascination with and compassion for animals.
After school one day, Menahem sees paramedics carrying an elderly woman onto an ambulance. His large, dark eyes wide, he watches as the woman’s German shepherd, clearly agitated, follows her, refusing to leave her side. At dinner, Menahem asks his father if animals
have souls. “Absolutely not,” Rabbi Abraham says, dismissively. Later, teaching a class of male followers, he says, “God doesn’t watch over those who don’t observe the Torah,” and asserts that non-observers, “just like inanimate objects, animals and plants,” exist only to serve the “righteous.”
Menahem, visually “framing” his father by peering through chair slats, fidgets on the sidelines, seemingly nonplussed. It’s clear, however, that Volach, once a Haredi boy, sees the potential conflict of worldviews between father and son, just as he sees how the father’s rigidity creates conflict, however subtle, between husband and wife, that will come to a head when tragedy strikes.•
MY FATHER MY LORD ★★★4
STARRING: Assi Dayan, Sharon Hacohen Bar and Ilan Grif
DIRECTOR: David Volach
RUNNING TIME: 74 minutes RATING: Not rated, but PG-13 equivalent for serious themes.
THE LOWDOWN: A rabbi’s strict adherence to ultra-Orthodox doctrine distances him from his young wife and animal-loving son. In Hebrew and Yiddish with subtitles.
