Fill The Void
Director: Rama Burshtein
Cast: Hadas Yaron, Yiftach Klein, Irit Sheleg
Length: 90 minutes
Country: Israel
It is always fascinating to journey into another culture, especially if it’s an unfamiliar one – and cinema is certainly one of the best mediums to do so. Yet this access raises a number of problems. Fill the Void is innately connected to the culture and religious traditions it represents and I can only view these complex structures as an outsider and therefore cannot draw intimate, personal comments and parallels to the content of the film. Yet Fill the Void, Israeli director’s Rama Burshtein’s newest work, is a film that demonstrates rather than analyses, leaving much space for the audience to ponder and reflect.
The film is set in Tel Aviv, more specifically – an Orthodox Jew community. We meet the main protagonist, Shira (excellently played by Hadas Yaron), in a supermarket, being shown her future possible husband. He is shyly standing in the dairy section. Shira’s mother Rivka (Irit Sheleg) shows him to Shira, and, with glowing eyes, asks her: ‘what do you think?’ Shira blushes and nods.
Having recently turned 18, Shira has reached an appropriate age for marriage, and her mother is mainly concerned with finding her a suitable partner. Another thing on Rivka’s mind is her heavily pregnant Madonna-like daughter Esther (Renana Raz). We see the family on the eve of Purim and witness an incredibly sweet scene between Esther and her husband Yochay (Yiftach Klein): slightly drunk on wine, he tells her ‘you’re my Torah’. It is beautiful. Yet something tells the audience that this idyll is not going to last long.
The same evening this harmony is broken. Esther dies in childbirth, leaving a gorgeous boy in the hands of his weeping father. However, merely two weeks after the tragedy, Yochay receives a marriage proposal from a Belgium-based Jewish widow, causing a disruption to both Rivka’s matchmaking and vision for the future. The prospect of little Malochay being taken away sets Rivka to tears and she proposes a possible solution: Shira is to become Yochay’s new wife, Malochay’s mother and restore harmony to the tragedy-struck family.
Even though Shira is often reassured that this is her own decision, it is clear that she faces an enormous dilemma. This is one of the underlying themes of the film: the role and position of an individual in this certain religious community. How far should personal wishes be repressed to serve both the community and family? Another prominent topic is one of Othering. The men and the women seem to be living in two separate universes with unique rituals and individual rules. The men perform the songs while the women sit at the end of the table, quietly listening. During Purim, the men drink wine, excessively poured by Aharon (Chayim Sharir), Shira’s father, a well-respected man, whilst the women occupy the kitchen, not participating in the official ritual, but chatting and sharing details of their lives. Within the 90 minutes of the film, Shira does not have a single conversation with her father. Her communication with Yochay is largely based on what is not said rather than what is actually being told. It seems that a looser link, not so heavily bound by tradition, between the male and female parts of the community, is not attempted.
Fill the Void is a uniquely filmed excursion into the life of a young woman within a complex community
Fill the Void is not a film with an agenda to challenge these notions. Burshtein herself states that “Fill the Void has nothing whatsoever to do with the religious-secular dialogue”. Therefore, I think that the goal of the film is not to analyse or deconstruct, rather – to demonstrate. However, Burshtein is not naïve and surely realises that the gender politics within this orthodox community are surely to be questioned and disputed by the audience. I think so because of certain nuances in characters, for example, Frieda (Hilda Fieldman) and Aunt Hanna (Razia Israeli), both unmarried women, who are viewed as somewhat dysfunctional due to their marital status. Hanna has learned her way to navigate through questions and investigations by simply putting a head-garment that constitutes her as a married woman, whereas Frieda bears the constant wishes of ‘her being the next one to marry’, and finally finds a resolution. Is it love or desperation? One can only ponder.
Yet Burshtein does not challenge these structures and wisely compares the world of the film to the one of Jane Austen’s novels, where the characters, instead of looking for a way out of the system, are searching for a means to live inside of it. And Fill the Void is exactly about that: a young woman, Shira, carefully navigating between her feelings, hopes for the future and duty to both the community and her family. It is beautifully represented by the sublime cinematography of Asaf Sudri revealing the claustrophobic environment of the family home and how the characters immensely repress their emotions by fixing on the characters’ faces and blurring their surroundings.
However, certain aspects of the film left me unsure of the director’s intensions. For example, the non-verbal relationship between Shira and her father: does it serve as a metaphor of the lack of communication in the family, perhaps even the community, or is it a lack of character development? It is left for the audience to the audience to decide. I enjoyed certain aspects of ambiguity within Fill the Void yet it makes me wonder whether there was too much space left for audience derivations within the content.
Overall, Fill the Void is a uniquely filmed excursion into the life of a young woman within a complex community, attempting to find her own voice within a sea of choices and decisions to be made. It is rare that a film speaks so much by actually saying so little – and Fill the Void achieves exactly that.
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