Menashe is a drama set amid Brooklyn’s ultra-orthodox Hasidic community. It is performed entirely in the Yiddish language. It is peopled exclusively by Hasidic non-actors. (Real-life grocer Menashe Lustig plays the title character.) It is small and specific, admittedly, but it also tells a universal story about a father’s struggle to hold on to the son he loves, and it tells this story tenderly, thoughtfully, beautifully. It may even be my favourite frum film of the year. Thus far. (Still a few weeks to go.)
This marks the feature debut of director Joshua Z Weinstein (no relation), who made documentaries previously, and who wrote this with Alex Lipschultz and Musa Syeed. Weinstein, a secular Jew, had decided he wanted to make a film set within the community, so was hanging around Brooklyn’s Borough Park — home to one of the largest populations of orthodox Jews outside Israel — looking for his story when he discovered Menashe Lustig, a widower with a son who, by his rabbi’s decree, would have to remarry before his son would be allowed to live with him. So this is a fictionalised account of that situation, starring Lustig, who is such a sublimely natural performer that he inhabits every scene as if it were effortless. Weinstein has described him as ‘Chaplin-esque’, with this ‘deep sadness about him’ and that’s it exactly.
The camera first shows Menashe at work at the till in a supermarket. He is a bear of a man, somewhat dishevelled, who wears the yarmulke and tzitzit but not the big hat and coat, which may be his mini-rebellion against the restrictions that conspire against him. His wife Leah had died a year earlier and, ever since, his son Rievan (Ruben Niborski) has lived with Leah’s brother Eizik (Yoel Weisshaus), who is stern but has a settled family life and is well heeled.
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