Celia Gurevitch Jewish Community Library

Last Thursday four of us watched through Esther Kahn and it made all of us think a little. For those who missed it I am happy to report that the DVD is available for borrowing from the library.

In retrospect this movie is better watched from a chair or sofa at the comfort of your home, than at a public place, which could not be darkened fully for the first third of the movie due to being daylight. Most of the film consisted of dark inside shots. The audio had varying volume too, but most often it was too low, even at the loudest setting. Some of us did not fully enjoy the way the camera followed Esther, the jumpiness due to the fact of being a handheld camera and/or the direction it was shooting at. There might have been some other unraised objections too.

Nevertheless we agreed that it was a thought provoking movie. Here are some of the thoughts that occurred in me while I watched. The rest of this post may contain spoilers so if you plan to see the movie, you may want read afterwards only.

Esther was brought up in a busy Jewish household and was explicitly asked as a young girl to suppress her coping mechanism of copying other people’s speech and mimicry. She internalized this and by the time she became a young woman (the movie does not show the intervening years) she seems to have repressed her emotions to the point where she was not even aware of them. She could not even express them even if she wanted.

I think the reason she chose acting as a career has a lot do with this suppression. Yes, she had natural talents that had to come out. What better way to learn to show emotions than acting? But, I also think that it was her way of assimilation. There were not too many routs to get out of her old circles that suffocated her. She physically and literally crossed the river to start afresh. She only went back once for support, when she was not sure in her own talent. She forced her own assimilation shedding away her Jewish roots. The angriest we’ve seen her was with her encounter with the rabbi. She expressed her anger at G-d, saying that because she was poor G-d did not care about her. This was the only outward expression she shared about anything related to Judaism. She was angrier at being poor, than being a Jew. But in her mind the two seemed to have been connected.

The biggest criticism I have against this movie is that we do not really see the development in Esther’s intonation. She spoke throughout the movie with a closely lips, barely opening her mouth. The film would have been more convincing if it had shown the flowering of her thespian gifts in terms of dramatic changes in her acting. But I could not really tell the difference from when she started up in a minor role with two lines to the end when she was the diva of a major play.