Nastacia Voisin |
The somber, sweetly seductive film “Felix and Meira” follows a young, married Hasidic woman as she slowly falls for a middle-aged atheist.
Neither the forbidden love arc, nor the religion vs. atheism narrative chart artistically new territory. Yet with gorgeous poetic shots, saturated in color and with an eye to nuanced beauty, director Maxime Giroux coaxes us to lean in and listen to these stories one more time.
The film was shot in cold and overcast Montreal, with under-lit lensing creating a chiaroscuro effect: light vs. shadow and day vs. night. Juxtaposition in fact, holds the story together, with characters coming in and out of focus, moving from sorrow to joy and from emptiness to being filled with wonder.
The main storyline belongs to Meira (Hadas Yaron) who lives in an insular Orthodox Jewish environment, surrounded by a tight community. Yet neither her marriage to soft-spoken, devout Shulem (Luzer Twersky), nor her young child cure her of a quiet unhappiness. Instead she plays forbidden records, takes birth-control pills and is unmoved by the observance of the Sabbath.
By contrast, Felix (Martin Dubreuil) strides through life with ambitionless, devil-may-care attitude. He fritters money away on luxuries, pretends to be indifferent to his father’s death and flirts shamelessly with Meira when they first cross paths in a pizzeria.
The romance between the two seems inconceivable at first (they don’t even share the same language - he speaks French, she speaks Yiddish). But Felix and Meira - hungry for connection and affirmation, intrigued by novelty - are drawn back together into a slow-blooming love affair.
Yet for all the tension and heavy intimacy of the film, the romance is occasionally hard to buy. Because Meira’s narrative - which visually dominates the film - feels more like a coming-of-age tale than one of true love.
She’s a girl padding cautiously, slyly, into womanhood, experimenting with the artifacts of youth: trespass, self-indulgence, dangerous secrets, forbidden love, unapologetic creativity. In her petulant stares, her deliberate betrayals, her refusal to explain herself, we hear her praying: “Let there be more to my life than this.”
In light of this, Felix is reduced to a loose thread, a distraction she cannot not stop tugging at, even as her life unraveled disastrously, irreversibly. She’s seduced by how a man so reckless and carefree could catch sight of pieces of her soul that everyone else frowns on, and instead name them beautiful.
In one scene, she closest herself in a bathroom, creeps close to the mirror, and gently-slowly-wonderingly lifts her eyes to stare at her reflection. Whom among has not felt that jolt of incongruity, realizing that our actions have transformed us into a stranger?
So even if it is patience rather than passion that makes “Felix and Meira” so compelling, it’s still an elegant, expressive snapshot of a young woman straining against a life too small for her spirit.
