One Woman's Writing Retreat: Film Review

A Price Above Rubies

Reviewed by Claudia Marinelli

Director: Boaz Yakin
Screenplay: Boaz Yakin
Scenography (set design): Dan Leigh
Music: Lesley Barber
Editing: Arthur Coburn
Costumes: Ellen Lutter
Cast: Renee Zellweger, Christopher Eccleston, Julianna Marguiles, Allen Payne, Glenn Fitzgerald, Shelton Dane
Running Time: 117 minutes

Synopsis

From the acclaimed director of the movie Fresh (1994), Boaz Yakin, comes this second interesting movie settled in the New York Hasidic community, and released in 1998.

Sonia (Renee Zellweger: Jerry Maguire, The Whole Wide World, One True Thing . . . ) is a young woman who was born into the hermetic Jewish Orthodox community, and was educated to respect and follow the hard and strict Bible rules. Her life reflects what her parents wanted for her: she married Mendel, a young promising learned, deeply religious scholar, she gave birth to a son, she moved into the Hasidic Brooklyn community because her husband got a prestigious position at a Yeshiva school.

Sonia's life should flow smoothly next to her gentle husband and his close-knit family: Rachel her sister-in-law and her husband Sender, who welcome her into the new home and community. But Sonia's free mind longs for a different life. She is not happy. Her marriage, her family, and her sexual life don't satisfy her: she must fight constantly her inner passions and her sexual needs that become, day after day, more impetuous and more uncontrollable.

Sonia is offered a position at Sender's jeweller's shop and she starts an affair with him: she experiences with him cold and hostile sex. But her job allows her to go out of the cloistered community to trade jewels, and to know a different world from the one she grew up in. Sonia, little by little, realizes that she doesn't belong to the Hasidic worl in order to free herself, she has to fight with her husband, with her relatives, with the community she lives in, and finally with her inner self.

But freedom has a very high price, a price higher than all the jewels and rubies Sonia can sell.

Review

The story is told from Sonia's point of view. Sonia refuses her own education and places her own needs before the needs of the community she lives in. She can't sacrifice herself for a familiar stability, or the stability of her community. The movie then, opens a very ancient, but still very modern debate, that Sophocles almost three thousands years ago, already illustrated by writing Antigone:  are the needs and the beliefs of a single person more important than the ones of the community we live in? Is it right to sacrifice family stability and emotionality, its "respectability", to get  your own personal freedom? Are the laws given by the community that guarantee, for good and for bad, the stability of that same community, more important than the personal beliefs and aspirations, or dreams of the individual? And what price should a person pay to have broken the rules?

Sonia, like Antigone, solves the debate in an individualistic way and pays a very high price: she looses her son, the love of her family and relatives, her financial security. By doing so, though, she becomes a heroin on all levels because she has the courage to recognize her own needs, to see herself for what she is and bear the consequences.

Boaz Yakin directed the movie with tact and carefulness. He spent several years studying at the New York Yeshiva schools and he wrote a fair screenplay that never lacks of coherence and reflects the real way Jewish Orthodox people express themselves. The setting too carefully reproduces the Jewish Orthodox houses and their interiors (with glass doors to divide rooms for example or plastic covers to protect the upholstery). The cast, that includes many good actors like Julianna Marguiles and Christopher Eccleston among others and, of course, Renee Zellweger supported by competent costume designers and make-up artists, reproduces accurately how Hasidic people dress, and talk.

A Price Above Rubies is a movie with no rhetoric. The director doesn't want to attack the Jewish Orthodox way of living; actually he seems very respectful of the culture and the lifestyle. Boaz Yakin seems to tell us that if you belong, because of your culture, or education, or personal convictions to a certain community, and you don't feel the need to change, nobody has the right to say that your way of living is right or wrong. But if you're "different", accepting to live in the wrong community because of a lack of courage to react and take a different "path" is wrong. Through the words of the characters we can understand that Yakin, who also wrote the movie's screenplay, is firmly convinced that if an individual's beliefs are deep and true, they have to be always respected. Sonia's husband is a true believer, and a good person too: he understands his wife and accepts the fact that she can't live with him because she's profoundly different. The Rabbi's wife too, to whom Sonia asks for help at the end of the movie to get back the ring Sender has taken from her, understands Sonia and respects her choices.

These two supporting characters are loyal and true to themselves and the society they live in; their lifestyle is not questioned at all.

A Price Above Rubies is an interesting movie that pictures the unfamiliar hermetic Hasidic world in America and might help us to understand a culture and a lifestyle so different from ours. But the movie is not just that, it also questions the audience about choices, issues, and prices we have to pay if we choose to follow our individualistic beliefs or dreams when these beliefs go against the rules of the community we live in.

Links:

IMDB's information about the film.

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