One word comes to mind when considering Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem: exhausting. This is not to say that this riveting new feature from Israeli co-directors (and siblings) Ronit and Schlomi Elkabetz is an unpleasant experience. On the contrary, Gett is one of the most engrossing and emotionally searing courtroom films of the past decade, in any language. However, the formal approach utilized by the filmmakers is deliberately designed to psychologically brutalize the viewer, the better to convey the wretched experience of its heroine.
In portraying the agonizing, five-year process in which ill-treated Israeli wife Viviane (Ronit) divorces her frigid, hidebound husband Elisha Amsalem (Simon Abakarian), Gett relies on a highly austere style, echoing the rabbinical legal traditions that are crucial to its narrative. The film's action, such as it is, is confined almost exclusively to a single courtroom and the adjoining hallway. Nearly every shot in the film approximates the viewpoint of a character. Far from reducing Gett to tedious shot-reverse-shot exchanges, this technique highlights the web of competing values and secret motivations that criss-cross the film's spaces between husband, wife, lawyers, judges, and witnesses.
It is Ronit's extraordinarily physical performance, however, that is the film's most engrossing feature. Viviane enters the film a frayed woman, and as her divorce rolls glacially forward (and occasionally backwards), she is repeatedly pushed to the verge of collapse. Ronit's portrayal—and those of all the actors, in fact—are spectacularly effective at expressing that which exists outside the courtroom. This includes not only the ugly reality of the Amsalems' marriage, but also the colliding sub-currents of Israeli culture. While Gett mounts an absolutely caustic attack on rabbinical law's heinous misogyny and the unforgivable lassitude of its courts, its criticisms emerge organically from cinematic drama of the utmost precision and potency.
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem opens Friday, March 20 at Plaza Frontenac Cinema.
