Menashe spotlights a Hasidic nonconformist

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      Starring Menashe Lustig. In Yiddish, with English subtitles. Rated PG

      Menashe is a gentle stroll through a subculture that isn’t quite as forgiving to its own. The film, which transpires almost entirely in Yiddish, centres on a burly Brooklynite, wonderfully played by Menashe Lustig, who’s a nonconformist by the austere standards of his Hasidic community.

      This recently widowed fellow works at a crummy bodega for a younger, ill-tempered boss who exploits him mercilessly. Something of a nonstarter even when married, our bearded bear of a man has essentially lost custody of his 10-year-old son, Rieven (Israel’s charming Ruben Niborski), to his late wife’s brother (Yoel Weisshaus) and family. According to ultra-Orthodox tradition, a child can’t be raised by a single parent—especially one who can’t be bothered to wear a black coat and hat year-round, and who sometimes has beers with the Latino workers at his market. He’s quite the bohemian.

      This feature debut by docmaker Joshua Z Weinstein, who wrote this with two others, is an intimate visit with a hard-to-penetrate subculture, and one that’s even harder to leave for people locked in its Old Testament embrace. The characters here are loaded with self-defeating contradictions. Despite his own predicament, Menashe is adamant that a boy at Rieven’s school should be kicked out because the kid’s father is “no longer observant”. And a middle-aged woman he dutifully meets as part of a matchmaking program asserts that she could never follow a rival rabbi, because “He allows women to drive! Can you imagine?”

      The men work, worship, study, mourn, dance, and drink almost entirely without the presence of women. And that’s pretty much true of the movie itself, which does not avail itself of any female perspectives within Menashe’s family circle. The movie has been compared to 1955’s similarly themed Marty, with Oscar-winning Ernest Borgnine as a Brooklyn butcher struggling to leave his mother’s nest. In fact, Menashe more closely resembles George Costanza, in that this hapless schlub generally compounds his problems by making unnecessarily bad decisions at every turn. Lustig is a standup comic in real life, and he has no problem holding the screen. But the script seems overly determined to knock its hero down, when the people around him could stand to do some growing up.

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