back behind bars

a fast closing of perspectives

unorthodox

Another series I watched during quarantine is the short and powerful Unorthodox, by Anna Winger, featuring the fantastic actress Shira Haas as Etsy, fleeing her unhappy marriage and the stifling rules set by her Hasidic community in Williamsburg, New York, to seek refuge in Berlin, although ambivalent to get help from her distanced mother once there. I found the story quite moving and intense in the slow unfolding of Etsy’s progressive unraveling of her un-orthodoxy and of her desperate escape into a world she knows nothing about. While her difficulties in apprehending this new universe are well rendered, I however find the part of the story when she joins a friendly group of music students somewhat too lazy a plot, although her fight there for achieving autonomy by herself only is remarkably transcribed. I am equally quite impressed by the show immersion into the Hasidic community, which is putting a considerable effort in replacing their tradition into an historical perspective and exposing the outworldly separation between men and women, who are essentially reduced to becoming mothers. The main strength of Unorthodox is that it keeps away from manichaeism, with people stuck into a frozen tradition and not seeing the oppression it induces. As most often with fundamentalism.